A Concise Companion to American Fiction 1900 - 1950

This Concise Companion offers an authoritative overview of American fiction from 1900–1950, focusing on the literature that developed out of the social, cultural, and political changes which occurred in the first part of the twentieth century. With careful reference to key authors and their works, newly commissioned chapters examine the period’s formative events, such as the Depression and the two world wars, and their representation in literature. In addition, essays also analyze the multiple and paradoxical self-descriptions that have been taken to define modernism, such as the “rise of proletarian literature” and the “high modernist” novel.

Looking at issues of race, language, cosmopolitanism, book production, and gender, this volume introduces the contextual information and strategic knowledge that students can use to formulate their own readings of classic American fiction. Authors such as William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, who have defined our understanding of modernism for so long, are reread in relation to key texts of the period by Richard Wright, Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anzia Yezierska. This Concise Companion examines the original context of these authors’ works and looks at its current reception to uncover how twentieth-century literature is being reinterpreted in the new millennium.