An Outline of American Literature (20th and 21st centuries) p.

After the World War I a group of writers known as the “Lost Generation” entered literature. They were influenced by the
war, their experience resulted in disillusionment.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1898 – 1961)

- main representative of the Lost Generation
- worked as a reporter. In World War I, he went to Europe as a volunteer and worked as an ambulance driver in Italy. In
1918, he was badly wounded in the leg and had to undergo operations. During the Spanish Civil War he was a war
correspondent in Spain. He loved Spain. He himself was much interested in fishing, hunting, boxing and bullfighting and
often wrote about the national Spanish sport corrida. In 1961 Hemingway committed suicide.

- His style of writing is excellent. Hemingway used simple words, his sentences are short, but they are often full of
emotion. (He could express emotion with few words). He is called a master of the pause. We can feel how the story
continues even during the pauses.
Can you explain the iceberg technique?

• Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for his famous book The Old Man and the Sea.
- Is is an allegory of human life; it is about Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far
out in the Gulf Stream. The story opens by explaining that Santiago has gone 84 days without catching any fish at all.
- Every evening, Santiago is visited by his former young apprentice, Manolin. Santiago tells him confidently that the
following day his unlucky streak will definitely end and he will finally catch a big fish.
- On the 85th day Santiago sets out and at noon a big marlin takes his bait.
- Santiago is unable to pull in the marlin and the fish is trying to free itself for 3 days. On the 3rd day the fish gets too
exhausted. After a long and patient fight, Santiago stabs the fish with a harpoon, straps it to the side of his boat (skiff)
and heads for home.
- While returning, the blood of the marlin attracts sharks and eat the fish down to the bones. When Santiago reaches
the shore, tourists laugh at him, but he does not complain. This is a sign of true heroism. The old man showed courage
in the fight and stoicism in defeat.

Among his best novels belong A Farewell to Arms – it is set during World War I and tells a love story of a young American
man who served in the Italian Ambulance Service and an English nurse. They escape to Switzerland, where there is no war.
But their happiness is destroyed when Catherine dies in childbirth.

• Another famous novel is For Whom the Bell Tolls and it is a psychological picture from Spanish Civil War.
• Other novels are Fiesta and Death in the Afternoon.
• Beside novels, Hemingway wrote many excellent short stories.

JOHN STEINBECK (1902 –1968)

- captured the period of the Great Depression in the 1930s. He won a Nobel Prize in literature.
- He often wrote about poor working‑class people and their struggle to lead a decent life during the Depression.

His best-known novel is The Grapes of Wrath. It is a picture of a poor family, which is exploited by the fruit-growers in
California. Other famous works are: Of Mice and Men, East of Eden , Travels with Charley.

!!! Of Mice and Men is a novella (1937), it tells the tragic story of ….
Post WWII period p. 2

JEROME DAVID SALINGER (1919–2010) – expressed the feelings of the post-war generation in novel The Catcher in the Rye.
Salinger wrote also nice short stories – Nine Stories.
The Catcher in the Rye, which is about a sensitive, sincere and pure teenage boy who is disgusted by the corrupted
behaviour and insincerity of people around himself. The boy runs away from his prestigious school.

Why does Holden want to be a catcher in the rye? What do the motifs of a field of rye and a cliff symbolize?

Social changes continued through the ’50s and ’60s. Family life was important, many people had children and settled in the
suburbs. Writers however looked at it a bit differently.
The 1950s gave birth to a literary movement known as the “Beat Generation”. Authors rejected traditional society and
looked for new experiences through drugs, jazz music and Eastern mysticism (Zen Buddhism).

JACK KEROUAC (1922 –1969)

- J. Kerouac was a Canadian-American novelist and poet, a pioneer of the Beat Generation
- He is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing covering topics such as, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs,
poverty, and travel.
- He died due to long-standing abuse of alcohol
- His writing is influenced by the Zen idea of spontaneity (A. Ginsberg wrote in a similar way)
- In his works he describes people “on the road” to freedom or looking for the meaning of life.

On the Road
- It is a largely autobiographical novel that was based on the spontaneous road trips of a group of Beats (Kerouac and his
friends) who travel westward across America. Symbolically, it is a trip from the „unfree“ city to the emotional, spiritual
and physical freedom of the West.
- It is often considered a defining work of the postwar Beat Generation that was inspired by jazz, poetry, and drug
experiences.
- It was typed on a scroll.

His next famous works are: The Dharma Bums (influenced by Buddhism) and
Big Sur (about a writer seeking solitude).

WILLIAM STYRON (1925–2006)

was an American novelist and essayist
wrote an excellent novel called Sophie’s Choice (1979) about a Polish woman who, while imprisoned in a concentration
camp was forced to make a cruel choice – which of her two children would survive and which would be killed. Her life in the
U.S.A. after the war was influenced by the bitter war experience.

The novel concerns a young American Southerner, an aspiring writer called Stingo, who befriends the Jewish Nathan
Landau and his beautiful lover Sophie, a Polish (but non-Jewish) survivor of the Nazi concentration camp.
Nathan and Sophie's relationship is intense and difficult.
Nathan claims to be a cellular biologist, which is later revealed to be a lie. He often takes drugs and as he suffers from
schizophrenia he becomes more and more violent and frighteningly jealous.
Sophie and Stingo try to flee to Virginia. On the way there, Sophie reveals her deepest, darkest secret: on the night that
she arrived at Auschwitz, she was forced to choose which of her two children would die immediately by gassing and which
would continue to live in the camp. Of her two children, Sophie chose to sacrifice her seven-year-old daughter, Eva.
This heart-breaking decision has left her in mourning and unable to overcome the guilt.
Despite the fact that Stingo proposes marriage to her, Sophie disappears, leaving only a note in which she says that she
must return to Nathan.
Upon arriving back in Brooklyn, Stingo discovers that Sophie and Nathan have committed suicide. Stingo is devastated.
KEN KESEY (1935–2001) p. 3
- A novelist, short story writer, and essayist, he is best known for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
- He considered himself a link between the Beat Generation the hippies: "I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to
be a hippie."
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
- It is set in a mental hospital, and serves as a study of the institutional process and the human mind. The story is narrated
by the gigantic half-Native American inmate "Chief" Bromden. It focuses on the rebellious Randle Patrick McMurphy,
who faked insanity to serve out his sentence in the hospital.
- The hospital ward is run by the tyrannical Nurse Ratched. McMurphy constantly upsets Nurse Ratched and her routines,
which leads to constant power struggles between the inmate and the nurse.
- One night McMurphy smuggles bottles of alcohol and two prostitute girlfriends onto the ward. Although McMurphy
plans to escape before the morning shift arrives, he and the other patients fall asleep instead and the staff finds the ward
in a complete mess.
- When the nurse Ratched sees what they have done, she threatens one inmate (Billy) she would tell his mum. Billy then
commits suicide. Enraged at what she has done to Billy, McMurphy attacks her and attempts to strangle her to death.
Nurse Ratched misses a week of work due to her injuries and when she returns she cannot speak.
- Later, McMurphy is brought back in. He has received a lobotomy and is now in a vegetative state, silent and motionless.
The Chief later smothers McMurphy with a pillow during the night and escapes the hospital.
- By losing her voice, Ratched has lost her tyrannical power over the ward. The patients transfer to other wards or check
themselves out of the hospital. By suffocating McMurphy, Bromden enables him to die with some dignity rather than live
as a symbol of Ratched’s power.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was made into an Oscar-winning film directed by Miloš Forman, a famous director of the
60s born in Czechoslovakia.

JOHN IRVING (*1942)

A novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter (for his script of The Cider House Rules, 1999), achieved
international success with his novels:
The World According to Garp (1978)

The Cider House Rules (1985)

Describe the main characters + the plot