The twentieth century American novel
The year 1900 produced little significant American fiction, if compared with 1899 or 1901.1900 writings by:
v Charles Chestnutt
v Stephen Crane
v Mark Twain
v Theodore Dreiser

Realism
v It emphasized the representative rather than the exotic or exceptional matters previously considered too unpleasant or controversial to figure in the novels are now given an airing such as :
v Divorce, in William Deam Howells's “A Modern Instance”(1882)
v A child awareness of adult sexuality, in James's “What Maisie Knew” (1887)
Naturalism
It shares with realism some commitment to an objective account of external reality and a tendency toward impersonal technique; a penchant for third person rather than first person.
Sordid subjects:
v Dire Poverty in Hamlin Garland's “Main -Traveled Roads”
v Prostitution in Craine's” Maggie:A Girls of the Streets.”
v Capitalist greed in Norris's “The Octopus” - Dreiser's “The Financier”
v Alcoholism in George's “Mother”
The movement from innocence to experience can be seen in :

v Mark Twain's “Huckleberry Finn”
v Fitzgerald's “The Great Gatsby”
v Salinger's “The Catcher in The Rye”

Three Major Novelists
v ERNEST HEMINGWAY

v FITZGERALD

v WILLIAM FAULKNER

ERNEST HEMINGWAY
v Hemingway's career began in the 1920s and extended to the beginning of the 1960s.His greatest work both as a novelist and as a short story writer , came in the inter-war year :
Novels:
v The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta) 1926
v A Farewell to arms 1929
v For Whom The Bell Tolls 1940
Short story collections:
v In our time 1925
v Men Without Women 1927
v Winner Take Nothing 1933
The Lost Generation :
v Those writers and critics who turned their backs on the values of the pre-war world and finding no artistic stimulus in the post-war American society. His style is inseparable from his world-view.

FITZGERALD
He borrows heavily from literary antecedents, the structure of Gatsby ,looks back to both “Moby-Dick” and Conrad's “Heart of Darkness”, and everywhere one finds echoes of Fitzgerald 's favorites poet, John Keats. The Keats Ian technique which the impression gained is described in an unexpected mixing of senses and the other aspects makes Fitzgerald a romantic writer where Hemingway was emphatically not. Fitzgerald was also a more committed American writer. “The Great Gatsby” is generally regarded as one of the most brilliant and complex attempts to delineate the American Dream. Although “Tender is the Night” deals with expatriates Americans in Europe would show, how many references there are to American culture.

WILLIAM FAULKNER
He probably the greatest of the three in the quality of his fictional output ,was a southern writer. This implies a strong interest in cultural memory ,for southern society is ruled by the twin fixations of the Civil War and Slavery.
v Faulkner used an array of modernist techniques in order to brings his characters into Byzantine relationships with the history ,class structure , racial divides , economics and myths of his very own community. Some of his techniques:

v Complex Time-schemes
v Multiple Narrators
v Stream of Consciousness

OTHER WRITERS

v Sherwood Anderson
v Sinclair Lewis
v John Doss Passos
v John Steinbeck
v Nathanael West
Sherwood Anderson:

He seemed to embody much of the artistic spirit of his time. He influenced in various ways both Hemingway and Faulkner and produced the first major work of American literature after the first World War.
Works that are indebted to him for this techniques:
v Faulkner's The Unvanquished (1938) and Go Down,Moses(1942)
v Hemingway's In Our Time(1925)
v William March's Company K (1933)
v John Steinbeck's The Long Valley(1938)
v Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples(1949)
Sinclair Lewis
He became in 1930,the first American author to received the Noble Prize in literature.
v Main Street (1920)
v Arrowsmith(1925)
v Elmer Gantry (1927)
John Doss Passos
He made significant contributions to the modernist impulse in early 20th-century American fiction with his great trilogy:
v 1.U.S.A:The 42nd Parallel (1930)
v 2.1919 (1932)
v 3.The Big Money (1936)
v In these writing he sought to encompass the life of the American nation between 1900 and 1929.
v 4.John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath(1939)
5.Nathanael West

His short novels are :
v The Dream Life of Balso Snell(1931)
v A cool Million (1934)
v Miss Lonlyhearts(1933)
v The Day of the Locust(1939
New Voices and Social Developments

THE WORLD WARS
The war novels :
v Three soldiers by Doss Passos
v The Enormous Room by e .e. Cummings
v Company K by March
v A Farewell To Arms by Hemingway

JEWISH NOVELS
The Jewish novelists were also the city novelists par excellence and came into prominence with a knowledge of the Holocaust and ,therefore, great feelings of anger ,guilt and fear.
novelists of Jewish fiction:
v Bernard Malamud
v Edward Lewis Wallant
v Philip Roth
v Saul Bellow
In these novels , particularly Malamud's “The Assistant”(1957), suffering becomes a key condition for understanding the meaning of existence and the necessity of becoming fully human.
YOUTH MOVEMENT
The 1950s in American was also the decade of 'Youth Culture' when teenagers separated themselves from the culture of their parents to asserts their own identity and stress the importance of peer-group politics, and that their culture was a subculture rather than a counterculture.

AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE
Early progenitors of this were :
v James weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)
v Jean Toomer's Cane(1923)
v Nella Larson's Quicksand (1928) and Passing(1929)

WOMAN WRITERS
It took the development of civil rights in the1950s and 1960s to rediscover the work of women writers ,such as: Kate Chopin and Mary Austin .Some of significant works of women :
v Mary McCarthy's The Group (1963)
v Alison Lurie's The Nowhere City (1965)3)
v Joyce Carol Oates's Expensive People (1968) and Theme(1969)

NEW VOICES, NEW STYLES
v After 1950, there was an argument that the chronicle of society had had its day and needed to be replaced by a new kind of journalism that would perform the task of showing the interplay between people and forces around them.
v Norman mailer's The Armies of the Night(1968)
v At this time, novels began to mix history and fiction to great effect even if the history is itself fantastic.
v E. L.Doctrow'sTHe Book of Daniel(1971) and Ragtime(1975)
THE MELTING POT
“The Melting Pot" of American society is now producing a truly multicultural range of fictions an experimental and epic variety of writing that seeks to find new voices and capture the immense potential and frustration of holding together such a vast complex and contradictory culture.