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John Steinbeck (1902-1968)Like Sinclair Lewis, JohnSteinbeck is held in higher criticalesteem outside the United Statesthan in it today, largely because hereceived the Nobel Prize forLiterature in 1963 and the internationalfame it confers. In bothcases, the Nobel Committee selectedliberal American writers notedfor their social criticism.Steinbeck, a Californian, setmuch of his writing in the SalinasValley near San Francisco. His bestknown work is the Pulitzer Prizewinningnovel The Grapes of Wrath(1939), which follows the travails ofa poor Oklahoma family that losesits farm during the Depression andtravels to California to seek work.Family members suffer conditionsof feudal oppression by richlandowners. Other works set inCalifornia include Tortilla Flat(1935), Of Mice and Men (1937),Cannery Row (1945), and East ofEden (1952).Steinbeck combines realism witha primitivist romanticism that findsvirtue in poor farmers who liveclose to the land. His fictiondemonstrates the vulnerability ofsuch people, who can be uprootedby droughts and are the first to sufferin periods of political unrestand economic depression.THE HARLEM RENAISSANCEDuring the exuberant 1920s,Harlem, the black communitysituated uptown in NewYork City, sparkled with passion andcreativity. The sounds of its blackJEAN TOOMERPhoto © UPI/The BettmannArchive74American jazz swept the UnitedStates by storm, and jazz musiciansand composers like Duke Ellingtonbecame stars beloved across theUnited States and overseas. BessieSmith and other blues singers presentedfrank, sensual, wry lyricsraw with emotion. Black spiritualsbecame widely appreciated asuniquely beautiful religious music.Ethel Waters, the black actress, triumphedon the stage, and blackAmerican dance and art flourishedwith music and drama.Among the rich variety of talentin Harlem, many visions coexisted.Carl Van Vechten’s sympathetic1926 novel of Harlem gives someidea of the complex and bittersweetlife of black America in theface of economic and socialinequality.The poet Countee Cullen (1903-1946), a native of Harlem who wasbriefly married to W.E.B. Du Bois’sdaughter, wrote accomplishedrhymed poetry, in accepted forms,which was much admired by whites.He believed that a poet should notallow race to dictate the subjectmatter and style of a poem. On theother end of the spectrum wereAfrican-Americans who rejectedthe United States in favor ofMarcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa”movement. Somewhere in betweenlies the work of Jean Toomer.Jean Toomer (1894-1967)Like Cullen, African-Americanfiction writer and poet JeanToomer envisioned an Americanidentity that would transcend race.