- Historic Sites A Century Of American Realism June 1970 |
Volume 21, Issue 4 The Depression and the Second World War were
intimately related; after all, the Depression did not end until
war broke out. Yet the Second World War did not produce many
great novels, and for very clear reasons. The middle-class
writers of the twenties went from protected, sheltered
homes—from a world still full of the belief in American
destiny—to the shattering experiences of the war. But the people
of my generation who went to the war from the Depression had no
illusions. The war seemed to us neither just nor unjust, but
merely a horrible necessity. It also follows that the people who
wrote after the Second World War were not middle-class, not
interested in forms the way Hemingway and Dos Passos were, not
as sophisticated artistically, and not very often as original.
Steinbeck wrote one or two quite good books, but he was not as
interesting a writer as Hemingway or Dos Passos. There is
nothing in the least original, artistically,