outline_us_lit

THEODORE DREISERPhoto © The Bettmann Archive55background and good family connections,to commit murder.Despite his awkward style,Dreiser, in An AmericanTragedy, displays crushingauthority. Its precise details buildup an overwhelming sense of tragicinevitability. The novel is a scathingportrait of the American successmyth gone sour, but it is also a universalstory about the stresses ofurbanization, modernization, andalienation. Within it roam the romanticand dangerous fantasies ofthe dispossessed.An American Tragedy is a reflectionof the dissatisfaction, envy, anddespair that afflicted many poorand working people in America’scompetitive, success-driven society.As American industrial powersoared, the glittering lives of thewealthy in newspapers and photographssharply contrasted withthe drab lives of ordinary farmersand city workers. The media fannedrising expectations and unreasonabledesires. Such problems, commonto modernizing nations, gaverise to muckraking journalism —penetrating investigative reportingthat documented social problemsand provided an important impetusto social reform.The great tradition of Americaninvestigative journalism had itsbeginning in this period, duringwhich national magazines such asMcClures and Collier’s publishedIda M. Tarbell’s History of theStandard Oil Company (1904),Lincoln Steffens’s The Shame of theCities (1904), and other hard-hittingexposés. Muckraking novelsused eye-catching journalistic techniquesto depict harsh working conditionsand oppression. PopulistFrank Norris’s The Octopus (1901)exposed big railroad companies,while socialist Upton Sinclair’s TheJungle (1906) painted the squalorof the Chicago meat-packing houses.Jack London’s dystopia The IronHeel (1908) anticipates GeorgeOrwell’s 1984 in predicting a classwar and the takeover of thegovernment.Another more artistic responsewas the realistic portrait, or groupof portraits, of ordinary charactersand their frustrated inner lives. Thecollection of stories Main-Travelled Roads (1891), by WilliamDean Howells’s protégé, HamlinGarland (1860-1940), is a portraitgallery of ordinary people. It shockinglydepicted the poverty of midwesternfarmers who were demandingagricultural reforms. Thetitle suggests the many trails westwardthat the hardy pioneers followedand the dusty main streets ofthe villages they settled.Close to Garland’s Main-Travelled Roads is Winesburg, Ohio,by Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941), begun in 1916. This is a loosecollection of stories about residentsof the fictitious town ofWinesburg seen through the eyesof a naïve young newspaper reporter,George Willard, who eventuallyleaves to seek his fortune in thecity. Like Main-Travelled Roads andother naturalistic works of the period,Winesburg, Ohio emphasizes