The Twenties: American Writing in the Postwar Decade

A literary decade cannot be minimized when it encompasses such writers as Mencken, Boyd, Nathan Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, Edmund Wilson, Stuart Sherman, Joseph Krutch in the field of criticism; Sinclair Lewis, Dos Passos, Glenway Wescott, Zona Gale?? (the only one who confessedly loved her middle west), Sherwood Anderson, Floyd Deil, Hemingway, Scott Fitzerald, Willa Cather, in the field of fiction; Ezra Pound, EE Cummings, T.??S. Eliot Marianne Moore, Walter Stevens, William Carlos Williams (though recognition ??came much later), Conrad Alken, Hart Crane in the field of poetry; Elmer Rice, Eugene O'Neill in drama; and a varied group in biography, history, science, with such giants as Einstein Whitehead, Dewey, Sandburg. Hoffman shows how post-war disillusionment with the Old Gang, the surge of enthusiasm for Marx and bohemianism, the reaching out for freedom across the sea, the rebellion against Puritanism, the preoccupation with death were symptoms rather than basic ideas. The cultural influences were immensely important; experimentation and imagination were evident in all fields; the greatest fault of the era was neither its vulgarity nor its immorality, but its naivete. He charts the positive values, indicates the parallels with this postwar decade, and defines the Twenties as "a melange of contrivance, experiment, pastiche and revolt". (Kirkus Reviews)