ome lived abroad and were known as the Lost Generation. F.Scott Fitzgerald s novels capture the restless, pleasure-hungry, defiant mood of the 1920s. Fitzgerald s great theme, expressed poignantly in The Great Gatsby, was of youth s golden dreams turning to disappointment. His prose was exquisite, yet his vision was essentially melancholy and nostalgic. Aldous Huxley (1894-1969) in his first published novels, The Defeat of Youth (1918), Limbo (1920), and Crome Yellow (1921) displays the verve, wit, and wicked sense of fun that captivated the post war generation. While living in Italy for several years Huxley associated with DHLawrence, and there he wrote Those Barren Leaves (1925), and Point Counter Point (1928), His most famous book, Brave New World, appeared in 1932. In it Huxley describes an anti-utopia, an ironic fantasy vision of a soullessly scientific, dehumanized future. In 1937 Huxley settled in California, working there as a screenwriter. He continued to pursue an interest in mysticism, evident in especially in his books Eyeless in Gaza (1936) and The Doors of Perception (1954) had also affected Ernest Hemingway. Having seen violence and death close at hand, Hemingway adopted a moral code exalting simple survival and the basic values ​​of strength, courage and honesty. In his own writing, he cut out all unnecessary words and complex sentence structures, concentrating on concrete objects and actions. The crisply intense prose style of Hemingway was as influential in French and Italian writing as in American as he sought the direct communication of intense feeling in the fewest possible words. His main characters were usually tough, silent men, good at sports or war but awkward in their dealings with women. Among his best books were The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). He eventually won the Nobel Prize and is considered one of the greatest American writers.expatriate, Henry Miller, used a comic, anecdotal style to record his experiences as a down-and-out artist in Paris. Miller s emphasis on sexual vitality made his books, such as Tropic of Cancer (1934), shocking to many, but others felt that his frank language brought a new honesty to literature.Thomas Wolfe felt like a foreigner not only in Europe but even in the northern city of New York, to which he had moved. Though he rejected the society around him, he did not criticize it - he focused obsessively on himself and on describing real people from his life in vivid characterizations. His long novels, such as Of Time and the River and You Can t Go Home Again, gushed forward, powerful, romantic and rich in detail, although emotionally exhausting.southerner, William Faulkner , found in one small imaginary corner of the state of Mississippi, deep in the heart of the South, enough material for a lifetime of writing. Faulkner saw the South as a decayed culture, and his characters were often eccentric or grotesque. His social portraits were realistic, yet his prose style was experimental. To show the relationship of the past and the present, he sometimes jumbled the time sequence of his plots; to reveal a character s primitive impulses and social prejudices, he recorded unedited the ramblings of his or her consciousness. Some of his best novels are The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Light in August (1932). Faulkner, too, won a Nobel Prize.fiction became increasingly popular in the Depression, for it allowed readers to retreat to the past. The most successful of these books was Gone With the Wind, a 1936 best-seller about the Civil War by a southern woman, Margaret Mitchell. Mitchell s characters, especially her heroine, Scarlett O Hara, and hero, Rhett Butler, were realistically drawn, although the plot at times became melodramatic.western novel became popular in the 1940s. The earliest westerns had been adventures of cowboys and Indian fighters, published in cheap fiction magazines in the late 19th century. Owen Wister s novel The Virginian (1902) had introduced a rugged, self-contained cowboy hero, who embodied the American ideal of the individualist.new century in American letters brought with it a direct reflection of the disturbing impact of industrialization and urbanization on the ways of life. It also brought new definitions of reality, both scientific and philosophical, that the 19th century had been formulating at the expense of orthodox beliefs. The scope of literary reference was broadened as well as disturbed. Experimental psychology had opened a new approach to the operations of the consciousness and then, through t...
