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very little money. Intellectual currents, particularlyFreudian psychology and to a lesser extentMarxism (like the earlier Darwinian theory ofevolution), implied a “godless” world view andcontributed to the breakdown of traditional values.Americans abroad absorbed these views andbrought them back to the United States wherethey took root, firing the imagination of youngwriters and artists. William Faulkner, for example,a 20th-century American novelist, employedFreudian elements in all his works, as did virtuallyall serious American fiction writers after WorldWar I.Despite outward gaiety, modernity, and unparalleledmaterial prosperity, young Americansof the 1920s were “the lost generation” — sonamed by literary portraitist Gertrude Stein.Without a stable, traditional structure of values,the individual lost a sense of identity. The secure,supportive family life; the familiar, settled community;the natural and eternal rhythms of naturethat guide the planting and harvesting on a farm;the sustaining sense of patriotism; moral valuesinculcated by religious beliefs and observations— all seemed undermined by World War I and itsaftermath.Numerous novels, notably Hemingway’s TheSun Also Rises (1926) and Fitzgerald’s This Sideof Paradise (1920), evoke the extravagance anddisillusionment of the lost generation. In T.S.Eliot’s influential long poem The Waste Land(1922), Western civilization is symbolized by ableak desert in desperate need of rain (spiritualrenewal).The world depression of the 1930s affectedmost of the population of the United States.Workers lost their jobs, and factories shut down;businesses and banks failed; farmers, unable toharvest, transport, or sell their crops, could notpay their debts and lost their farms. Midwesterndroughts turned the “breadbasket” of Americainto a dust bowl. Many farmers left the Midwestfor California in search of jobs, as vividlydescribed in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes ofWrath (1939). At the peak of the Depression,one-third of all Americans were out of work.Soup kitchens, shanty towns, and armies ofhobos — unemployed men illegally riding freighttrains — became part of national life. Many sawthe Depression as a punishment for sins ofexcessive materialism and loose living. The duststorms that blackened the midwestern sky, theybelieved, constituted an Old Testament judgment:the “whirlwind by day and the darkness atnoon.”The Depression turned the world upsidedown. The United States had preached a gospelof business in the 1920s; now, many Americanssupported a more active role for government inthe New Deal programs of President Franklin D.Roosevelt. Federal money created jobs in publicworks, conservation, and rural electrification.Artists and intellectuals were paid to createmurals and state handbooks. These remedieshelped, but only the industrial build-up of WorldWar II renewed prosperity. After Japan attackedthe United States at Pearl Harbor on December7, 1941, disused shipyards and factories came tobustling life mass-producing ships, airplanes,jeeps, and supplies. War production and experimentationled to new technologies, including thenuclear bomb. Witnessing the first experimentalnuclear blast, Robert Oppenheimer, leader ofan international team of nuclear scientists,prophetically quoted a Hindu poem: “I ambecome Death, the shatterer of worlds.”MODERNISMThe large cultural wave of Modernism,which gradually emerged in Europe and theUnited States in the early years of the 20thcentury, expressed a sense of modern lifethrough art as a sharp break from the past, aswell as from Western civilization’s classical traditions.Modern life seemed radically differentfrom traditional life — more scientific, faster,61