Short biography
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Biography of Mark Twain
His real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, but he is I better known by his pen name, Mark Twain. One of the important figures in American literary history, Twain holds a unique position in American literature. He was not only a great writer; he was also a famous humorist, a…
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John Steinbeck and the 1930s
The world depression of the 1930s affected most of the population of the United States. Workers lost their jobs, and factories shut down; businesses and banks failed; farmers, unable to harvest, transport, or sell their crops, could not pay their debts and lost their farms. Midwestern droughts turned the…
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William Faulkner and the Southern Tradition
The American south includes the southeastern states and the southern states along the Gulf of Mexico. American south is a unique region with its distinctive culture, tradition and history. Essentially speaking, American south was an agrarian society, where people had strong sense of the past, the tradition. They attached great…
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Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald
Although American prose between the wars experimented with viewpoint and form, Americans wrote more realistically, on the whole, than did Europeans. Novelist Ernest Hemingway wrote of war, hunting, and other masculine pursuits in a stripped, plain style; William Faulkner set his powerful southern novels spanning generations and cultures firmly…
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T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a well- to-do family with roots in the northeastern United States. He received the best education of any major American writer of his generation at Harvard College, the Sorbonne, and Merton College of Oxford University. He studied Sanskrit and Oriental…
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Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Ezra Pound (1885-1972) Ezra Pound was one of the most influential American poets of this century. From 1908 to 1920, he resided in London, where he associated with many writers, including William Butler Yeats, for whom he worked as a secretary, and T.S. Eliot, whose Waste Land he drastically…
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Modern Poetry (Imagism)
Imagism flourished in Britain and in the United States for a brief period that is generally considered to be somewhere between 1909 and 1917. As part of the modernist movement, away from the sentimentality and moralizing tone of nineteenth-century Victorian poetry, imagist poets looked to many sources to help them…
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The Emergence of Modernist Literature (Modern Poetry)
Many historians have characterized the period between the two world wars as the United States’ traumatic «coming of age,» despite the fact that U.S. direct involvement was relatively brief (1917-1918) and its casualties many fewer than those of its European allies and foes. John Dos Passos expressed America’s postwar…
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Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, and baptized as Herman Theodore Dreiser. He was the ninth of ten surviving children (three others died as infants) of Säräh Schanab and Johann Dreiser. Dreiser’s childhood coincided with the family’s hard times. Consequently, his earliest memories included the joblessness of…
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Jack London (John Griffith Chaney. 1876-1916)
Jack London, whose life symbolized the power of will, was the most successful writer in America in the early 20th Century. His vigorous stories of men and animals against the environment, and survival against hardships were drawn mainly from his own experience. An illegitimate child, London passed his childhood in…
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