S ince the 1890s, an undercurrent of social protest had coursed
through American literature, welling up in the naturalism of
Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser and in the clear messages of the
muckraking novelists. Later socially engaged authors included
Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, Richard Wright,
and the dramatist Clifford Odets. They were linked to the 1930s in
their concern for the welfare of the common citizen and their focus
on groups of people -- the professions, as in Sinclair Lewis's
archetypal Arrowsmith (a physician) or Babbitt (a local
businessman); families, as in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath; or
urban masses, as Dos Passos accomplishes through his 11 major
characters in his U.S.A. trilogy.
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
Harry Sinclair Lewis was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and
graduated from Yale University. He took time off from school to
work at a socialist community, Helicon Home Colony, financed by
muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair. Lewis's Main Street (1920)
satirized monotonous, hypocritical small-town life in Gopher
Prairie, Minnesota. His incisive presentation of American life and
his criticism of American materialism, narrowness, and hypocrisy
brought him national and international recognition. In 1926, he was
offered and declined a Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith (1925), a
novel tracing a doctor's efforts to maintain his medical ethics
amid greed and corruption. In 1930, he became the first American to
win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Lewis's other major novels include Babbitt (1922). George Babbitt
is an ordinary businessman living and working in Zenith, an
ordinary American town. Babbitt is moral and enterprising, and a
believer in business as the new scientific approach to modern life.
Becoming restless, he seeks fulfillment but is disillusioned by an
affair with a bohemian woman, returns to his wife, and accepts his
lot. The novel added a new word to the American language --
"babbittry," meaning narrow-minded, complacent, bourgeois ways.
Elmer Gantry (1927) exposes revivalist religion in the United
States, while Cass Timberlane (1945) studies the stresses that
develop within the marriage of an older judge and his young
wife.
John Dos Passos (1896-1970)
Like Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos began as a left-wing radical
but moved to the right as he aged. Dos Passos wrote realistically,
in line with the doctrine of socialist realism. His best work
achieves a scientific objectivism and almost documentary effect.
Dos Passos developed an experimental collage technique for his
masterwork U.S.A., consisting of The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919
(1932), and The Big Money (1936). This sprawling collection covers
the social history of the United States from 1900 to 1930 and
exposes the moral corruption of materialistic American society
through the lives of its characters.
Dos Passos's new techniques included "newsreel" sections taken from
contemporary headlines, popular songs, and advertisements, as well
as "biographies" briefly setting forth the lives of important
Americans of the period, such as inventor Thomas Edison, labor
organizer Eugene Debs, film star Rudolph Valentino, financier J.P.
Morgan, and sociologist Thorstein Veblen. Both the newsreels and
biographies lend Dos Passos's novels a documentary value; a third
technique, the "camera eye," consists of stream of consciousness
prose poems that offer a subjective response to the events
described in the books.
John Steinbeck (1902-1968)
Like Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck is held in higher critical
esteem outside the United States than in it today, largely because
he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963 and the
international fame it confers. In both cases, the Nobel Committee
selected liberal American writers noted for their social
criticism.
Steinbeck, a Californian, set much of his writing in the Salinas
Valley near San Francisco. His best known work is the Pulitzer
Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which follows the
travails of a poor Oklahoma family that loses its farm during the
Depression and travels to California to seek work. Family members
suffer conditions of feudal oppression by rich landowners. Other
works set in California include Tortilla Flat (1935), Of Mice and
Men (1937), Cannery Row (1945), and East of Eden (1952).
Steinbeck combines realism with a primitivist romanticism that
finds virtue in poor farmers who live close to the land. His
fiction demonstrates the vulnerability of such people, who can be
uprooted by droughts and are the first to suffer in periods of
political unrest and economic depression.