У. Faulkner grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, in a house full of near and distant relatives and family lore about glorious ancestors, among whom the writer’s great-great-grandfather William Clark Faulkner particularly stood out. The glorious great-great-grandfather was a lawyer, a colonel in the Confederate Army in the Civil War, author of the popular romantic novel The White Rose of Memphis (1881), and possessed a solid income and a keen sense of honor. The Faulkner family, prominent and wealthy, owned the railroad, had experienced financial decline by the early twentieth century. W. Faulkner’s father had to earn a living: he kept stables, a store, then became treasurer of the University of Mississippi.

In 1915 Faulkner graduated from school; in 1918 he enlisted as a volunteer in the Royal Canadian Air Force and served several months in Toronto. In 1919 he was admitted as a young veteran to the University of Mississippi, where he studied French language and literature, but left that occupation after a year and a half. He worked as a bookstore clerk in New York City, a carpenter, a house painter, and then as a university postmaster in his native Oxford. In 1924 he went to New Orleans, where he met S. Anderson, which determined his fate as a writer.

Since his school years, trying to compose poetry and short prose without much success, who had a few magazine publications and a poetry collection “Marble Faun”, Faulkner found in Charles Anderson a patron, an inspiration and teacher. In 1925 he traveled through Europe, visiting Italy, Switzerland, France and England, and returned to New Orleans, and soon went to his Oxford, to live there until the end of his days. Faulkner’s tribute to the cosmopolitan spirit of his generation was thus minimal; what nourished Hemingway, Henry Miller, and others all their lives–travel, impressions, exposure to the world–Faulkner fit into one year. It was not until the early 1950s, when he became a Nobel Prize winner, that he left Oxford for short trips to lecture in Europe and once in Japan.

Faulkner’s tribute to the theme of “lost” prose was also minimal, boiling down to a collection of short stories and two novels (The Soldier’s Reward, 1926; Mosquitoes, 1927). Already in his late 20’s he found his original theme – the history and modernity of the American South – and published two works (“Noise and Fury,” 1929; “Sartoris,” 1929), which then became part of the so-called “Yoknapatof Saga.”

Faulkner’s Yoknapatof is more than seventy short stories, mostly grouped into cycles (“Come Down, Moses!”, “The Undefeated,” etc.), and seventeen novels: “Light in August” (1932), “Absalom, Absalom!” (1936), Requiem for a Nun (1951), The Village Trilogy (1940), The Town (1957), The Mansion (1960), and others, all set in the fictional Yoknapatofa County in the Southern United States, with characters moving from work to work.

Yoknapatofa, populated by aristocrats (Sartoris, Compsons, Sutpens, DeSpaines), descendants of their black slaves and “white rabble,” is an exact model of the Southern province, behind which a certain global mythological model of life in general peeks. The scale and significance of what is happening is emphasized by the author’s explicit or implicit reference to the Bible, to ancient Native American mythologies and rituals.

The very structure of mythopoetic thinking of America of the passing is imprinted in a peculiar principle of organization of the artistic world of the Yoknapatof saga, where the past is intertwined with the present, for time here moves not in a progressive sequence, but cyclically, and the fates of people are built into its eternal rotation.

The writer’s accurate reproduction of the mythological concept of time and human life, the very style of mythological thinking, is the result of his intuitive approach to the primary foundations of existence, which, in turn, is associated with Faulkner’s rootedness in the life of the patriarchal agrarian American South, which carefully preserves its traditions. This rootedness in many respects explains the fact that W. Faulkner’s work, closed in space but infinitely broadened in time, based not on individual concrete historical experience but on the eternal human experience, escaped from the rather narrow aesthetic framework of post-war literature.

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The main aesthetic event of the European literature of the twenties was modernism with its characteristic perception of life as chaos and widespread moods of melancholy and hopelessness, fueled also by the memory of the decadence of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, by the ideas of O. Spengler. Spengler’s ideas of the “twilight of the gods” and the “sunset of Europe. The atmosphere of postwar America, which had lost many of its illusions, was quite consistent with these ideas. Emory Blaine, the hero of Scott Fitzgerald’s 1920 novel This Side of Heaven, did not go to war, but “grew up only to discover that all gods were dead, all wars had died, all faith undermined. America did not survive the turn of the century in the European manner, but displaced it in time and combined it with the aesthetic upheaval of modernism, which reflected the inner world of man after World War I extremely vividly and impressively.

Modernist art was not a means of influencing the world morally, but a way of creating an alternative world – the world of the artwork, the precision and accuracy of which formed a kind of counterbalance to the chaotic and monstrous absurdity of life around. In contrast to the reality absolutely beyond human control, senseless and hostile to him, the proportionality of the proportions of this world was entirely determined by the skill of the artist, had an independent aesthetic sense.

In addition, the modernist approach to art allowed unrestricted freedom of creativity and artistic experimentation. For American writers, it allowed them to overcome both the “puritan limitations” of national culture and the “pervasive commercial spirit” of the economic boom, which were equally destructive for the creative personality. The modernist approach to art and to life: daring experiments in narrative technique, bohemianism, expatriation – was the way out for American writers, especially for the younger generation, from the newly provincial framework of the national literature. “Something subtle and elusive has permeated America,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “a way of life.

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Anderson’s biography before this radical turn was typical of the “average American” who made his way in the world by his work. Raised in a large family of Southerners who moved to the Midwest in search of work, he volunteered to fight in the Spanish-American War, then served as an advertising agent in Chicago, briefly attended college in Springfield, opened a paint company in 1906, only to abandon it six years later and start life anew.

In fact, the turning point in his fortunes that occurred in 1912 was the result of a nervous breakdown rather than a conscious “conversion” to art. The results were nonetheless striking, though more enriching to American literature than Anderson’s. One of the “gurus” and patrons of young American novelists remarked that “the only thing he can teach is anti-success.” Anderson’s writing biography is indicative of the fate of the American literary man of the 1920s and 1930s.

He was published in Chicago magazines, and when he had no money, he made extra money writing advertisements, was friends with the poets of the “Chicago Renaissance” of the 1910s (Carl Sandberg and others), in 1921 he lived in France, where he became friends with the talented writer-expatriate and a great original, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). This lady declared earnestly: “The Jewish nation has produced only three original geniuses – Christ, Spinoza and me. She was also a thoughtful mentor to the young American talent of the twenties (Paris was their Mecca at the time), particularly E. Hemingway.

Sherwood Anderson became the literary “godfather” of William Faulkner: while living in New Orleans (1922-1923), he met the aspiring novelist and later helped him with the publication of his first novel. Anderson’s own novels – The Marching Men (1917), The White Poor Man (1920), Across the Desire (1923) and others – as well as his journalism (America in Confusion, 1935) are interesting and characteristic phenomena of American literature of that period. But Anderson’s true discoveries and his enormous role in the development of American literature are connected with the short story genre.

The short story, as we remember, occupies a special place in the literary history of the United States. With the publication of Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, a distinctive national literature began. The novellas of Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe, along with the novels of Cooper and Melville, propelled it into the forefront of the world. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, there was a crisis of the genre. The traditional short story with its dashingly twisted action and indispensable happy ending, established with the works of J. London, Bret Harte and O. Henry, had practically exhausted its possibilities. Most importantly, it ceased to correspond to the spirit of the times, the postwar revaluation of old values and the rejection of optimistic illusions.

The twenties saw a radical change in the American novel, which reflected the shifts in social attitudes of the time and at the same time defined the development of the genre in the United States for decades to come. This turning point is associated, above all, with the name of S. Anderson. In 1919 he published a book of short stories “Winesburg, Ohio,” then “The Triumph of the Egg” (1921), “Horses and Men” (1923), “Death in the Woods” (1935).

The short stories in Anderson’s books were unlike anything that had appeared in American literature before. Nothing happened in them, they lacked a plot in the proper sense of the word. All the events and facts were hidden in the subtext. The center of gravity here was shifted from intrigue to revealing the psychology of the hero, a detailed study of his emotions. Each of the short stories described a small, unremarkable piece of reality, in which, as in a compressed spring, the fates of people, their joy and their pain were contained. The reader, to the extent of his or her reading and human experience, was free to unwind this “spring. The main “element” of such short stories was a tremendous emotional tension, also hidden in the subtext.

Anderson’s innovation in the field of the short story genre had a huge impact on all contemporary writers in the United States. He became the father of the American novel of the twentieth century. Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, then Steinbeck, Caldwell, Updike, Saroyan, Salinger and many others followed. The tradition of the “hero-grotesque” was developed independently in national literature.

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For example, Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), Nobel Prize laureate (1954), “citizen of the world” and writer of the widest range, at the same time forever retained a certain mark of the “lost”, which manifests itself sometimes in a recognizable composition structure, a recognizable turn of plot or character trait of the hero.

In fact, not only Frederick Henry (“Goodbye, Gun!”, 1929) and Jacob Barnes (“And the sun rises”, 1926), but Harry Morgan (“To have and have not”, 1937) and Robert Jordan (“For Whom the Bell Tolls”, 1940), and even old man Santiago (“Old Man and the Sea”, 1952) – a kind of “defeated winners”, behind the courageous firmness and strength which hides the restrained tension and unviable mental pain. In the novel “Across the River in the Shadow of the Trees” (1950) Hemingway openly returned to its problems, poetics and stylistics of the 20′s, the theme of the First World War, telling the story of its veteran, now a colonel Richard Cantwell, his bitter doomed love for the young Italian Countess Renate, a girl “whose profile tingled the heart”, and his untimely death, which ended this love.

Hemingway’s prose, polished, extremely economical in its pictorial means, was largely prepared by the school of journalism. This prose of the master, whose masterly simplicity only emphasized the complexity of his artistic world, has always relied on the personal experience of the writer.

Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and spent his childhood in northern Michigan; his father, a physician, helped, among others, the Indians on the local reservation and sometimes took his son with him, a segment of life reflected in the early years of Hemingway’s lyrical hero, Nick Adams (In Our Time, 1925). Hemingway’s experiences of the First World War, where he volunteered, formed the basis of the short stories of Men Without Women (1927) and the novel Farewell, Arms!

Real biographical facts (service in the Red Cross unit on the Italian-Austrian front, a serious wound and a stay in a Milan hospital, a tumultuous, but which brought Hemingway only bitterness and frustration love for a nurse Agnes von Kurowski) artistically transformed in the novel and cast in a crystal clear, distinct and penetrating picture of the suffering and courageous stoicism of the “lost generation”.

Hemingway’s characters (and the author himself) are symptomatic of his predilection for extreme manifestations of life involving mortal risk, such as bullfighting (And the Sun Rises; Death in the Afternoon, 1932; Dangerous Summer, 1960) and safaris (The Green Hills of Africa, 1935; Francis Macomber’s Short-lived Happiness; The Snows of Kilimanjaro). In these manifestations, brutality and death appear aesthetically transformed-not by slaughter, but by the art of bullfighting and wildebeest hunting.

Always in the thick of the events of his time – as a correspondent, as a direct participant, and as a writer – Hemingway responded to them with his journalism and works of fiction. Thus, the atmosphere of the “angry decade” and the Spanish Civil War were recreated in the short stories of the collection Winner Gets Nothing (1935), the novel To Have and Have Not (1937), the “Spanish journalism”, the play The Fifth Column (1938) and the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). The events of the 1940s, when Hemingway, who had settled in Cuba, hunted on his yacht Pilar for German submarines in the Caribbean Sea, are reflected in his posthumously published novel Islands in the Ocean (1979). At the end of World War II, the writer participated as a war correspondent in the liberation of Paris.

The powerful final chord of his creativity (the rest of his works were published posthumously) was a story-parable The Old Man and the Sea, the action of which takes place in Cuba. The last years of Hemingway’s life were overshadowed by severe physical ailments, and in 1961 the writer, not wishing to surrender to old age and illness, committed suicide with a shot from a hunting gun, as his father once (in 1928) did. Shortly before this, Hemingway had returned to his native land, having bought a house in Ketchum, in the west of the country.

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Indian lyrical prose of the ’20s and ’30s developed the theme of the dual position of half-breeds (“Half-breeds” (1927) by Morning Dove, of the Okanogan tribe; “Three Brothers” (1935) by John Milton Oskinson, of the Cherokee tribe; “Surrounded” (1936) by Darcy McNickle, of the Flathead Tribe), as well as the theme of the World War I veteran who, upon his return, cannot find himself in either Indian surroundings or in “white” society (like Challenge Windsor in John Joseph Mathews’ “Dawn” (1934), of the Osage Tribe). Some of the plot motifs and characters in these works directly anticipated the Native American prose of the 1970s and 1990s.

The true flowering, however, was in the 1920s of African American literature. This flowering was, on the one hand, an organic part of the overall postwar upsurge in U.S. literature, but on the other, it was also one manifestation of the upsurge of black culture that stunned white America and went down in history as the Harlem Renaissance. By the end of World War I, in place of the former self-assertion of a race of former slaves in the original “white”, “master” sphere – the sphere of creativity – a distinctive art, filled with a sense of dignity and significance, had finally taken shape.

The Harlem Renaissance began as a literary movement, with the novel The Reed by Jean Toomer (1923), the poetry of Langston Hughes (Tired Blues, 1926), Claude Mackay and County Cullen, the prose of William DuBois (The Dark-Skin Princess, 1928) and Zora Neale Hurston (The Eyes That Saw God).

It was something new not only in Afro- but in American literature in general, puritanically constrained and turned predominantly (except maybe Dreiser and Stephen Crane) to a patriarchal existence. It is no coincidence that this novel is now regarded as one of the outstanding events of postwar prose in the United States. It is a bold and original experiment, a sharply modern urban literature, and it is a manifestation of liberation – physical, psychological (for the novel provides an outlet for repressed impulses) and aesthetic – freedom of self-expression.

This novel is a kind of model of Harlem Renaissance culture that draws on African American song and narrative folklore and combines its free rhythm, its underlying power and nervous energy with the strong uneven pulse of the big modern city. All this is transformed into aesthetically new and edgy forms, expressing as best as possible the free and cosmopolitan spirit of the times.

The Harlem Renaissance is also remarkable because it proved to be a unique phenomenon. For the first time, black musicians, artists, and writers did not oppose whites. At the same time, they did not abandon their roots, did not seek to “pass for white”, on the contrary, they even toyed with the idea of “black Africa. But their “blackness” was for them only one of the means, not the end, of self-fulfillment. They felt like equal members of the great cosmopolitan brotherhood of talent. For the only time in the history of African-American culture they were expressing an individual creative consciousness, not a racial or a class one.

The early work of Richard Wright (1908-1960), following the Harlem heyday, is very characteristic of the period: the short story collection Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), the novels Son of America (1940) and Black (1945). This phenomenon in its own impressive, large and talented. Wright’s denunciatory pathos, his fierce hatred of whites, his threatening demonstration of the destructive impulses of black nature that accumulate under the pressure of social injustice (they are especially evident in the character of Bigger Thomas, the “son of America”) are telling. The author’s blatant (admittedly Wright himself) imitation of the manner of G. Uncle Tom’s Children”, as well as the perception of Wright’s autobiographical character, a black artist (“Black”), of creativity as a weapon against white society.

These features of early Richard Wright’s manner, ideologically and partly artistically, mark a giant step backward from the African-American prose of the 1920s, to W.W. Brown’s “Clotelle” and the passionate revelations of “The Life of Frederick Douglass” (remarkably, it and Wright’s autobiographical novel “Black” are separated by exactly one hundred years).

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