The general reorientation of fiction was reflected in the treatment of authors to a new range of problems, the main of which were, first, the labor movement (strikes, strikes) and the lives of ordinary people and, secondly, the fight against fascism (especially the war in Spain). Thus, S. Anderson portrayed the textile workers’ strike in North Carolina (“Across the Desire,” 1932), J. Steinbeck in a new way, with greater social certainty, approached his favorite theme – the plight of American farmers (“The battle with the outcome of doubtful”, 1936; “Grapes of Wrath”, 1939).

E. Hemingway, one of the brightest representatives of the “lost generation,” also turned to socially significant problems in these years. The topic of the labor and farm movement was never organic to him (in his novel To Have and Have Not, he ironically depicted the literary man Richard Gordon, who was “writing his fourth novel about strikes”). Hemingway turns to what he himself experienced and felt – the anti-fascist struggle in Spain, to which the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Changed issues required and other than before the principles of implementation. For works written in the 20 th years, was characterized by lyrical reticence, depth in the inner world of man. They mediated the entrance of the outer world. The thirties saw a broadening of the range; social reality directly invaded the books of American authors, who found a gravitation towards the universal coverage of events and, consequently, to the epic principles of representation. The prose of the thirties was predominantly epic.

Thus, John Dos Passos attempted to create an “American epic” – the trilogy “USA”. It included the novels “The 42nd Parallel”, “1919” and “The Big Money”. Variants of the modern epic also appear much smaller novels “Grapes of Wrath” (1939) Steinbeck and Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. Both were written at the end of the 30’s and soaked up the atmosphere of the “angry decade.

The novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940) reveals a clear continuity with the works of Hemingway 20s. Events are passed through the perception of the confused hero, who is shown at a crisis point in his biography. The composition is based on the principle of “compressed time”. The action of the novel covers only three days. Robert Jordan, an American volunteer, is on a mission. He has to blow up a bridge in the rear of the Frankists. During these three days, Jordan manages to live, in fact, a whole life, to feel the whole gamut of human feelings: the happiness of love, the joy of solidarity, the pain for his comrades, whom he is forced to risk.

An extreme manifestation of the reorientation of U.S. fiction in the 1930s was the emergence of openly propagandistic social protest novels as a mass phenomenon: critics have counted more than 70 works of this genre, released in the country for one decade. The creators of these novels were mostly proletarian authors; many of them first turned to literature at the call of class consciousness.

Significantly, the second generation of Jewish-American writers (first-generation Americans), born before World War I and who spent their childhood in Jewish ghettos, contributed greatly to the social novel of protest: Michael Gold, Edward Dahlberg, Alva Bassey, Albert Maltz, Howard Fast, Tilly Olsen, and many others. They entered literature in the “red thirties,” which determined the general thrust of their work. More precisely, in many respects it was they, fascinated by the ideas of Karl Marx, the Russian proletarian revolution, and the proletcult, who defined the “red” character of the “angry decade” in U.S. literature.

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Almost as popular in 1920s America was the name of Sigmund Freud, the Austrian psychoanalyst of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries who occupied the minds of European intellectuals. Freud explained to people that the true essence of personality lies in its subconscious sphere, which is based on three instincts: eros (instinct of life), tanatos (instinct of death) and libido (sexual instinct). He explained that a person’s childhood experiences are deposited in the subconscious in the form of “complexes” – the Oedipus complex (the son’s subconscious dislike for his father), the opposite “Electra complex,” and others – that the person can neither eliminate nor explain, and is therefore doomed to an agonizing struggle with himself.

In the twenties, Freud was on the lips of every educated American, even those who had never read his work. He was fashionable in Europe, and his theory effectively justified human drives. In the American materialist turn it produced skepticism, even cynicism.

This time, which, with the light hand of F. Scott Fitzgerald, has been called the “jazz age,” was a time, not only of dismissive frivolity about life, but also a time when the arts flourished. Central and intriguing in its novelty, the cultural phenomenon of the 1920s was the so-called Harlem Renaissance, the sudden postwar flowering of “black” art in the United States, which, in fact, makes the decade the “century of jazz.

Beginning as a literary movement, the Harlem Renaissance involved the entire artistic bohemia of America’s black capital – artists, musicians, singers – and seemed to “open the borders” of the Negro ghetto. The new black art entered the life of the whole country; for a time Harlem became its intellectual and cultural center. The Harlem Renaissance was Duke Ellington, the first jazzman of the 1920s, the “black legend” of American jazz; it was professional tap singer Bill Robinson; it was singer Bessie Smith, the blues singer, the sweet chocolate dream of white boys who didn’t make it to the trenches and craved unusual sensations; it was the brilliant actress Ethel Waters and many others.

The new century has created powerful competitors to the book in the form of radio, movies, and big sports. At the same time, its technology, its expanding communications network, and its growing advertising industry fostered the creation of new magazines and new publishers. Publishers went after authors, magazines competed for the right to print their stories; writers began to earn more, and their audiences expanded considerably. With the advent of the sound film era in 1927, Hollywood began to attract many famous writers, such as Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Dashiell Hammett, Nathaniel West, with unheard ofly generous contracts. Most writers, however, felt rather discouraged at the sight of the nation’s shameless pursuit of money.

If in the twenties the ruler of thoughts was Z. Freud with his concept of personality, now it was Karl Marx with his critique of capitalism. Marx’s ideas in the popular interpretation of domestic “Marxists” (Joseph Freeman, Michael Gold, etc.) were very widespread and sympathetic in America. “The Red Decade,” “the angry decade,” was how the 1930s were defined in American culture.

Hitler’s rise to power in Germany (1933), the threat of a new war that shadowed all of Europe, the brutal persecution of Jews by the Nazis – all these interrelated events forced hundreds of writers, artists, musicians, scientists and philosophers (both Jewish and non-Jewish) to seek refuge in the United States. Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Albert Einstein, and others are the immigrants of this wave.

However, despite the complicated situation in the world, America remained too preoccupied with its domestic problems to give up its policy of neutrality. “America First,” the name of an isolationist organization, was the slogan of many Americans. Subsequently, however, it became clear that full economic recovery could only come about after America joined the World War II countries, an action that accelerated its rise as a world power and radically changed again the life of the nation, its culture and literature.

Until the middle of the twentieth century, New England literature was considered “American,” Midwestern, Southern, and Western literature was considered “regional,” and the work of Jewish and African American writers was considered “minority” literature.

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Moreover, the war drastically reduced the productivity of all writers. As W. Faulkner remarked, “you don’t write well in war.” Many writers were at the front as war correspondents (like E. Hemingway) or in the active army (like J. Cheever, S. Bellow, N. Mailer, C. Vonnegut), and they naturally had no time for artistic creativity. Most importantly, however, both they and those who remained in America needed first to comprehend this newly changed world and the place that man occupied in it. Genocide and the possibility of total nuclear annihilation affected not only European Jews and Japanese, but all people on both sides of the globe, destroying the last vestiges of national American naivety and “innocence.

The end of the previous period of U.S. literary development was vividly underscored by the deaths of several major writers of the 20s and 30s: Scott Fitzgerald and Nathaniel West were gone in 1940, S. Anderson passed away in 1941, and G. Stein in 1946. The era of modernism is gone, although its greatest representatives – E. Hemingway and W. Faulkner – still continued to create.

With the end of the war in the national literature came a new generation of young writers with honest realistic works about their tragic experience. The writers who first gave a reflection of World War II in American prose were J. Hersey (Hiroshima, 1946), N. Mailer (Naked and Dead, 1948), I. Shaw (The Young Lions, 1948), G. Wook (The Caine Conspiracy, 1951), J. Jones (From Here and Forever, 1951) and other “war novelists”, as critics defined them. M. Cowley lamented at the time that, unlike the First World War, which produced a vivid literary experiment, the Second brought to life only the most traditional realism. Very soon, however, it became clear that Cowley had been somewhat hasty in his judgments.

After World War II, Jewish-American literature came into the national spotlight. Its authors spoke as if they were speaking on behalf of millions of European Jews who were victims of genocide to whom they owed a debt of blood. They had yet to make sense of this monstrous historical experience. It is telling that the most impressive works about the genocide did not come out until the 1970s: Singer’s Shosha, Epstein’s The King of the Jews, Bellow’s Mr. Samler’s Planet. In the meantime, it was necessary to rethink the unique experience of American Jewry.

Since the mid-1940s there has been an incredible flowering of Jewish-American literature – poetry, drama and, especially, prose. It is at this time that the work of J.B. Singer becomes a fact of American literature, the World War I-born S. Bellow, A. Miller, and later B. Malamud and writers of the next generation (born in the 20s and 30s): Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Herbert Gold, Joseph Heller, Edgar Lawrence Doctorow, Grace Paley, Leslie Epstein and many others begin to publish. Most are postmodern writers.

Postwar Jewish-American literature is distinguished from earlier literature by a special sense of history, heightened by the tragic experience of Jewishness. Associated with the sense of historical instability is the desire of the postwar generation of Jewish-American writers not only for religious, political, or ethnic self-definition, but above all for existential self-definition: “What does it mean to be human?”

Not surprisingly, the most striking and yet very diverse works in U.S. literature about World War II, a time that devalued the human person to the utmost, were written by Jewish-American writers. Norman Mailer’s novel The Naked and the Dead (1948), for example, stunned readers with the poignant authenticity of direct war testimony. “Joseph Heller’s Amendment-22 (1961) presented the war and everyday life of the “heroic” American army as utterly absurd, eliciting Homeric laughter and bitter doubts about the sanity of the world order as a whole.

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s (1904-1991) novel Shosha (1978), which shook America as a reflection on the catastrophic madness of genocide, was also a book about the tragedy of modern man, whose mystery of existence is dark to him, because the path of salvation he seeks, he is essentially searching blindly. The author sees the only answer to the nonsense of historical catastrophe in the fatal loyalty of man to his human destiny. This fidelity is embodied by Singer in the image of the blessed “foolish girl” Shosha.

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