he influence of Sigmund Freud revealed the inherent drama of the subconscious. In stylistics, as well as in subject matter, the new science had its effects on authors, leading them toward meaningful experiments in the communication of realities. The romantic efforts of earlier writers, like Whitman and Emily Dickinson, to originate styles to fit their individual personalities were extended by Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and others to devise a syntax appropriate to non-Aristotelian logic and new concepts of time. They were not simply trying to be different; on their own 20th century terms they were impelled by an Emersonian intention to make patterns of words correspond to the newly defined nature of things. With such efforts went an increased sense of literary responsibility. Although the modern ways of thinking meant a temporary and confusing dislocation of the man of feeling from his traditional values ​​and modes of expression, the birth of the century was intellectually exciting.20th century attempt to understand the nature of things and develop a new vocabulary and syntax for expressing it led, significantly for the writer, into the development of formalized aesthetic considerations and the emergence of a mature American literary criticism. The distinguished discussions by Henry James of his own intentions and tactics were succeeded by the work of a long line of writers who in their analyses of craft paralleled the influence of their own artistic successes. Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens were notable examples. Editions of the letters of Pound, Hart Crane, and Stevens deepened the influence of their formal writing. So did the critical comments of Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein s writings about writing may well prove to be her most important contribution to letters.the career of Theodore Dreiser, and with the appearance of Sister Carrie (1900), American fiction entered a new phase of franker realism in its approach to contemporary life. Dreiser drew from the experiences of his own family for his story of the unpunished rise of a woman of easy virtue; he knew that the way up carried unresolved ambiguities with it. Stephen Crane (1871-1900) in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (written 1892; privately published 1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895), which treated cowardice rather than cavalier glory in war, had helped to open the way for unconventional attitudes and subject matter. Many writers turned toward the dark shadows on the American dream. Frank Norris (1870-1902) in The Octopus (1901) dealt with the strangulation by the railroads of independent wheat growers in California. The Jungle (1906), by Upton Sinclair, was based on the evils of the Chicago meat-packing industry.new moral didacticism in fiction developed. But most novels in this literary manner of social engineering lacked the ungainly vitality and sympathetic understanding of Dreiser s amoral portraits of Jennie Gerhardt (1911) and of the Darwinian rise of the American business magnate in The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914). Dreiser shifted from the purely personal ethic of these works to a social ethic in An American Tragedy (1925), his greatest novel. Here he indicted society in the guilt of a weak-willed youth tried for murder, for society had held up the goal of success without providing an accompanying morality. The story was an American tragedy, because in a country where the people are themselves their only king, whenever a part of society falls, all society drags itself down in a democratic version of Aristotelian tragedy.writers examined themselves and their society. Jack London (1876-1916) wrote much the same kind of fictional self-analysis in Martin Eden (1909), although he is best known for his vigorous tales of Alaska (The Call of the Wild. 1903) and of the Pacific (The Sea-Wolf, 1904). Lewis (1885-1951), in Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), and Dodsworth (1929) gave the most popularly received picture of the American tortured, as he put it, like a god self-slain on his modern improved altar. Lewis was a graphic writer. He prepared his image-breaking novels with the precision of a sociologist, gathering characteristic details to integrate into his studies of the crippling small-town and average-city life of businessmen, scientists, preachers, and reformers. In 1930, Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature.Anderson (1876-194)), in the plotless tales of Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and The Triumph of the Egg (1921), showed the tentative gestures of man desperately groping for beauty and fulfillment in the face of personal inhibitions and social frustrations.other significant representatives of the group as writers of fiction were Katherine A...
