Sinclair Lewis (辛克莱.路易斯1885-1951)
The first American author to win the Nobel Prize for literature, but was called the worst important writer in American Literature.
main Street （大街）:deals with Parochial small-town life
Babbit (巴比特)：paints a truthful picture of the middle-class business world of post-war America. Babbit is now a word in English dictionary as a synonym for the vulgar and philistine business man.
Style: accurate in external description but lacking in psychological exploration. (so he was considered conservative and outmoded)

Willa Cather  (薇拉.凯瑟1873-1947)
1.She was fond of traditional values, unable to come to terms with modernity, and tried to reject the modern and escape into the refuge of the past.
2.She moved to a prairie state of the west. Thus Old West becomes in most of her novels the center of moral reference. In her novels, the frontier rural community is always morally higher whereas the town is effete and corrupting. The immigrant folks are both simple and noble, and their life, though primitive to an extent, orderly and meaningful.
My Antonia (我的安东尼亚): Antonia, a girl from a poor immigrant family from the prairie. Her father commit suicide in despair. Then she goes to work as a house maid. But she is dallied and then deserted. After that, she goes back to work on her brother’s farm. As soon as she returns to the prairie, she regains her courage, tranquility and her optimism. Her childhood friend, a boy from a well-to-do family, now a successful businessman in the city, cherishes his memory in the prairie and his relationship with Antonia,  returns to the west to seek Antonia out as if in a quest of a lost paradise, he finds her “a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.”
The Song of Lark （白灵鸟之歌）
A Lost Lady (迷途的女性)：The old Captain in it is a symbol of Old West, one of the pioneers, a pattern of courage, chivalry, and courteous brotherhood.
The Professor’s House (教授的住宅)：It bodies forth the author’s keenly felt desire to reject and withdraw from the modern world.
Summary: Professor ST. Peter builds a new house, but refuses to move from the old house where he wrote his book and won with it the prize money with which to build the new house. He has to choose between the new and the old, and he prefers the latter. There he stays, retreating into the past.

Thomas Wolfe (沃尔夫1900-1938)
Wolfe was a personal writer. All his writings are self-revelations so that his art borders on being confessional. All the experiences related in his fiction are autobiographical.
Look Homeward, Angel: （天使望故乡）His first novel. A narrative of his boyhood experience, his life with his parents and brothers, and his final departure from his native place.
Of Time and the River （时间与河流）:second novel, tells about his stay at Harvard, his brief career as an instructor of English in a New York University, and his trip to Europe and return to America.
The Web and the Rock (网与石)
You Can’t Go Home Again: About the major events in the last few years of Wolfe’s life.
Chapter17
The1930s
Dos Passos   Steinbeck
1. In 1929, with the Wall Street Crash, the Great Depression began. This was the first financial crisis. As the Depression spread, life became a nightmarish experience of want, poverty, and absolute misery. There was widespread panic.
2. During the period, social concern was topmost in the minds of many authors, and social involvement was the major feature of the literature of the 1930s.
James T. Farrel (1904-1979) a naturalist writer （法内尔）
Studs Lonigan trilogy
1. Young Lonigan 少年朗尼根
2. The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan 斯塔兹朗尼根的青年时代
3. Judgment Day 审判日
It is a record of the brutalizing experience in Chicago during the Depression Period. Studs, the hero of the trilogy, living in a meaningless and violent slum environment, encounters forever alienation, violence, and eventual destruction.
It is a record of his life from 1916-1931. Born in a middle class family, Lonigan is smart, rich in imagination. But he shows no interest in learning. Instead, he gets along well with a gang of hoodlums in a slum, believing that can show his masculine. He despises traditional moral codes, and gets corrupted gradually, and yields to the pressure and seduction of environment completely. He dies of heart attack at the age of only 19. It is the suffocating environment that led to his ruin.
John O’Hara 欧哈拉1905-1975
Appointment in Samara约会沙马拉
 It is a study of a member of an upper class family. It presents a segment of the life of the 1930s.
John Dos Passos 多斯.帕索斯1896-1970
He was a leading naturalist of the Depression
He experienced a shift in his ideas. He started off writing for the oppressed, calling himself in 1917 a “red radical revolutionary”. His writings were Communist-oriented for a long time. In 1936, he dismissed communism. In the meantime, he made attacks on capitalism. In the 1950s, he changed to conservatism completely. During the latter part of his career, he showed admiration for business, and supported America involvement in the Vietnam War.
Two trilogies: District of Columbia 哥伦比亚特区
U.S.A美国: the best work of the period: The 42nd Parallel北纬四十二度, 1919 一九一九, The Big Money 赚大钱
USA:1. It is known as a “collective”, dealing with the lives of 11 leading characters and over 30 minor ones. It consists of 12 interwoven fictional narratives, each told from the viewpoint of its central characters.
2. It begins with the birth of the 20th C, and leads up to the 1930s.
3. The trilogy presents us a near-authentic fictional history of the evolution of America. It reveals us two worlds, or two Americas. One is the rich, with power in their hands, the other is the oppressed, the ordinary people. These were the years in which the socialist suffered defeat, and industrialist and financiers and businessmen emerged winners. It makes a study  on the history, the social conflicts and the masses of the modern society. Therefore it is regarded as an American epic. The general tone of the trilogy suggests that triviality and weakness of the individual make social revolution unlikely.
Style:
1. Passos employs devices which had not been known before: Newsreel (consists of newspaper headlines, extracts from newspaper reports, and bits of popular songs), Biography (about famous Americans who emerged as benefactors of mankind), Cameral Eye (written in stream of consciousness without punctuation, capitalization). These give an idea of the social unrest and the mood of the times.
2. simple diction, impressive images, rhythmical sentences and parallels.
3. colloquial style.
John Steinbeck 斯坦贝克1902-1968）
Another significant Depression writer, a Nobel Prize writer, and regarded as “Spokesman of the oppressed”
Subject matter: the migrant workers
Masterpiece: Of Mice and Man 人与鼠 It symbolizes people who have no house and have to move here and there
The Grapes of Wrath 愤怒的葡萄
Of Mice and Man (It appeared in 1937, and became a bestseller)
It is a sad story of two migrant workers, one of whom (Lennie) is very strong and powerful physically but mentally weak and deficient, and the other (George), the younger and the smaller, who takes care of the big one. What they wish for is a permanent home, a very small house with trees around. But this is pure dream for the helpless. Finally, disaster overtakes them. One day, when Lennie stays in the barn alone, wife of the landlord who feel lonely at home comes to talk with Lennie. As Lennie likes pets, especially likes caressing the smooth hair of animals, she asks him to feel her hair. Later, Lennie stroked very hard, and she cried and asked him not to mess it. Her crying puts him in panic, so he covers her mouth to stop her crying, and suffocates her to death. Thereafter, the local people were after him to lynch him, while the small one tries to keep him from being lynched. In order to free him from being tortured brutally, the small one killed him just before he was arrested.