“There is not a person in the literary world who has not heard of, read and some stolen from NIGHTWOOD. The paradox … is … I am the ‘most famous unknown of the century!’” Writing to Natalie Clifford Barney in the 1960s Djuna Barnes (1892–1982) makes a hyperbolic claim about both her 1936 novel Nightwood and her oxymoronic obscurity, but in neither case is she wholly misguided. Nightwood, described on publication as a book that “does not belong to any easily definable class,” is a defining work of the twentieth century but woefully absent on roll calls of the American novel. Barnes has been a marginal figure in the literary canon, a repeated anecdote of expatriate American modernism rather than a writer of influence. Barnes is difficult, what Daniela Caselli describes as an “improper modernist” not easily suiting labels such as “queer,” “feminist,” or “avant-garde,” and her fictional style can still disconcert the most diligent of readers. But Barnes’s major fiction shows that she is much more than a literary anecdote. Exploring Barnes’s career as a writer and novelist it becomes clear that she offers a particular response to the cultural and literary tumult of the early twentieth century and is a unique voice in the history of the American novel.

New York Journalism

Barnes began her writing career as a journalist in New York at the age of twenty-one, employed as a writer and illustrator for the Brookyln Daily Eagle in spring 1913. She was soon writing and interviewing for a range of New York publications including the New York World Magazine, New York Tribune, and New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine. Established as a successful freelancer, Barnes went on to write for Vanity Fair after her move to Paris in 1919 and for the Theatre Guild Magazine in the early 1930s.

Readers seduced by the power of William Faulkner’s rendering of the South may think that he invented the region, but it was already – and had been for centuries – a heavily written-about place. To understand Faulkner’s contribution to American fiction, we need to consider the background of southern attitudes that developed and took hold in the half-century following the Civil War. During this period a number of southern writers transformed, retrospectively, the meaning of the Civil War – from a history of defeat to the myth of the Lost Cause. In the writings of Thomas Dixon (The Clansman, 1905) and Thomas Nelson Page (The Old Dominion, 1908), for example, the South “became” a place of aristocratic gallantry, a preserve of Old World culture. Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories, published throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century, softened the portrait of race relations as well, giving it a picturesque, fit-for-children charm. The South’s humiliation of 1861–5 was thus reconfigured to read as tragic despoliation, entailing the release of lawless black beasts upon the American scene. D. W. Griffith’s immensely popular film version of Dixon’s The Clansman – Birth of a Nation (1915) – crystallizes this reactionary vision of the South. That Faulkner’s first-grade teacher would give him a copy of The Clansman to express her appreciation of the boy’s promising talents suggests how far the myth had penetrated into the precincts of normative southern self-awareness (Blotner 1: 94)

Faulkner inherited such a notion of his region – his great-grandfather had been a flamboyant defender of the Old South during and after the Civil War – and vestiges of the myth recur as a sort of default dimension of his weaker writings. But his great work – the work that reveals Faulkner as Faulkner – sees strenuously through this myth. Indeed, the act of seeing through this myth enables Faulkner to become the most powerful white novelist of race relations this country has yet produced. No reader of his work before Light in August (1932), however, could have predicted such a turn in his career.

The novel existed before the United States of America, but American history has been peculiarly conducive to the novel’s formal possibilities. When Miguel de Cervantes wrote arguably the first novel, the globe was still terra incognita. The story of Don Quixote (1605, 1615) was largely the story of antiquated assumptions about culture, history, and identity being subjected to and in a sense destroyed by new ways of perceiving, knowing, and imagining that ever since that period have persistently been called “modern.” Even as the form of the novel spread throughout Europe and on to America and elsewhere, its persistent preoccupation has been the question of individual identity. The novel has charted the relationship between an individual consciousness and the world around it. To Cervantes, Quixote’s quest to assert the will of his self, though, was unsettling and fundamentally comic. Previous heroes such as Achilles, Odysseus, or Aeneas fulfilled their destiny; they did not create it. The prospect that an individual could fashion himself as a protagonist, a hero, without the consent or even the interest of the gods and despite the prevailing wisdom of social institutions such as the church was the beginning of a new conception of identity. “In the absence of a Supreme Judge,” Milan Kundera suggests, the world of Don Quixote “suddenly appeared in its fearsome ambiguity” as the “single divine Truth decomposed into myriad relative truths parceled out by men. Thus was born the world of the Modern Era, and with it the novel, the image of and model of that world” (6).

Philip Roth’s (1933–) recurrent narrator, the novelist Nathan Zuckerman, writes these words as he nostalgically recalls his youth in the late 1940s. Then, all of America lay before him like a golden promise, and he was innocent of the tragedy that would fell his heroic subject, Ira Ringold, a Jew destroyed by his blithe confidence in the American myth of self-invention. Zuckerman exemplifies Roth’s engagement with an enduring preoccupation of American literature: how history floods into – or washes away – the Emersonian self engaged in its own making.

Roth’s contribution to American literature over the course of more than fifty years and thirty books lies in his scrutiny of American selfhood from the vantage point of a late twentieth-century postimmigrant Jewish sensibility. During the postwar period, numerous writers in the United States charged themselves with redefining the category of “American novelist,” teasing out “American” as an indeterminate, pluralistic identity and “novelist” as a maker of many forms. Those writers, Roth among them, did not stray far from their nineteenth-century forebears, such as Hawthorne, Twain, or Melville, who wrested a literary culture from the unique landscape and history by seeking an American idiom and subject matter.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) was a natural born storyteller, whose capacity for the southern rural black vernacular can be compared to Mark Twain’s for the southern rural white vernacular. In her best-known work, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), she provides an intimate portrait of early twentieth-century black southern rural life via the personal story of a young woman whose quest for love leads her instead to self-knowledge. Hurston’s protagonist, Janie Crawford, has become one of the best-known heroines in American literature, whose internal quest can be compared to that of Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier of The Awakening (1899). Certainly, the central black woman’s quest narrative in Their Eyes served as inspiration for Gwendolyn Brooks’s title character in Maud Martha (1953), the women in Ntozake Shange’s for coloured girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf (1975), Alice Walker’s Celie in The Color Purple (1985), and indeed a variety of subsequent characters in the works of authors from Toni Morrison to Alice Randall and Sister Souljah. Their Eyes was bold and audacious for its time. Hurston broke with black literary establishment prescription and told a story about working-class southern rural black folk living their everyday lives (warts and all), about a woman for whom sexual pleasure was an important aspect of marriage, and finally about a woman whose self-identity was ultimately not tied to marriage. Time and again in her work, Hurston explores (with a rare honesty) the complexities of gender role expectations in heterosexual relationships. Though her attention to women’s lives makes her part of feminist literary history, Hurston was a staunch individualist who was politically conservative. She faced harsh criticism from black critics as well as from leftist critics – regardless of race. She responded to critics by becoming even more conservative, an orientation that increasingly marginalized her in black literary circles. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and W. E. B. DuBois all expressed public disapproval of her and her work for a variety of reasons.

Let’s not waste a moment. Miss Highsmith has been waiting a long time.

Patricia Highsmith (1921–95), who spent half her life outside the United States and saw her best works corralled into categories that couldn’t begin to account for their depth, their dazzle, and their direct attack on her readers, wrote six or seven of the darkest, most delinquent novels of the last half of the twentieth century.

At least two of them, Strangers on a Train (1950) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), are masterpieces of midcentury American fiction – and in the old-fashioned sense, too. They shed light and throw shade on the modalities, manners, moeurs, and psyches of profoundly transgressive, specifically American characters in ways that should have staked Highsmith’s claim to a corner of literature’s best back lot (strewn, now, with crumpled carbon paper, point-less fountain pens, and discarded typewriters) – the Great American Novel.

“In the dim beginnings, before I ever thought consciously of writing, there was my own name,” wrote Ralph Waldo Ellison (1913–94), “and there was, doubtless, a certain magic in it.” The words were delivered at a 1964 lecture to the Library of Congress, where Ellison’s copious volumes of papers would eventually find a posthumous home. The title of the lecture, “Hidden Name and Complex Fate,” refers to his near-namesake Ralph Waldo Emerson and to Henry James’s proposition that it “is a complex fate, being an American.” A dozen years after the publication of Invisible Man (1952), his only completed novel, Ellison could already riff on the sage of Concord and what he called the “super subtle fish fry” of James’s House of Fiction, knowing that he had already been canonized.

The instant classic that seemed only to expand over time – it still expands today – documents a nameless hero who, in his junior year at a black college, unwittingly seals his fate when he drives a white trustee named Mr. Norton (as in the publishing house) to a bar called the Golden Day (as in the book by the American Renaissance scholar Lewis Mumford). Through a series of misadventures that include a black sharecropper’s routine about father-daughter incest, the hero is kicked out of college and sent, with a batch of poison letters of recommendation, to a man called Mr. Emerson. (The hero only gets as far as meeting Mr. Emerson’s son, a bundle of neuroses.) The self-destruction is devastating, but the satire is palpable in every detail, and the hero’s dialogue with Mr. Norton demonstrates the palpable irony of Ellison’s hidden name and complex fate:

In 1849, as he was arranging for the publication of his third novel, Mardi, Herman Melville (1819–91) wrote to his friend Evert Duyckinck, editor of the Literary World. The topic of discussion was Melville’s reaction to hearing Emerson lecture at the Freeman Place Chapel in Boston. “Emerson is more than a brilliant fellow,” the young author explained. “To my surprise I found him quite intelligible.” Emerson might be a fool, “full of transcendentalisms, myths & oracular gibberish,” but he was at least a fool who “dives”: “I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; & if he dont [sic] attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can’t fashion the plummet that will.” “Thought-divers” – this was the term Melville reserved for the writers who impressed him as unrestrained in their pursuit of difficult truths. Shakespeare stood at the head of the class as “the profoundest of thinkers,” capable of “those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality.” But even Shakespeare could feel the pressures of political or cultural restraint. If only he had been an American:

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64) is at the very center of the American novel tradition, not only because so many students read The Scarlet Letter (1850) in high school or college, but also because the issues the book raises – sex and religion, liberation versus repression, gender and the position of women, the nature of the human personality and the prospects for remaking the social order – are enduringly part of American culture. Hawthorne’s special insight, like Faulkner’s, is his understanding of how individuals are at once timeless in their basic impulses and inflected by and enmeshed in history, often tragically. We must read him with something of this same understanding. Hawthorne is different from us, a man of the mid–nineteenth century even when he writes of the mid–seventeenth, and he is also like us, addressing versions of the conflict between the “I want” and the “thou shalt” (social, moral, religious, psychological) that besets people in all ages and cultures.

Hawthorne came to the novel late, at forty-five, in what might be called the third phase of his career. The first phase was the period of near-seclusion he spent mainly in his family house in Salem between his graduation from Bowdoin College in 1825 and the publication of Twice-Told Tales in 1837, years in which he wrote and anonymously published many of his best and nearly all of his darkest tales. The second phase began with his marriage to Sophia Peabody in July 1842 and their settling at the Old Manse in transcendental Concord, and it extended through the fall of 1845 when a combination of events returned Hawthorne to Salem and presently installed him as surveyor of customs in the Salem Custom House.

Mark Twain (1835–1910) first made an impact on the American literary scene with “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” published in 1865, the year the Civil War ended. The dates are not just coincidental, for sectional animosity among its readers could be put aside in this comic story of the American frontier, written by an adopted westerner in a distinctively “American” style. As soon as Simon Wheeler starts to speak, any idea of a standardized national “literary” language crafted according to a model of eastern cultural propriety effectively falls away. Wheeler’s opening statement, “There was a feller here once by the name of Jim Smiley, in the winter of ’49 – or may be it was the spring of ’50 – I don’t recollect exactly, somehow” (JF, 9), is the first step in a literary journey that leads straight to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) – “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ but that ain’t no matter,” (HF, 17) – and from there to Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Russell Banks’s Rule of the Bone (1995).

Hemingway’s pronouncement that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn” may be both overquoted and exaggerated, but the novel stands nonetheless as a crucial intervention in the nation’s literary history. The radical impact of Twain’s use of the vernacular as he gives Huck, his ill-educated and disreputable first-person narrator, control of his novel cannot be underestimated. The American vernacular had of course seen literary use before the “Jumping Frog” story.

For readers across the United States in 1905, “The novel of the year, with the emphasis on the ‘The,’” was Edith Wharton’s (1862–1937) The House of Mirth: “Above the level of our modern novels it towers head and shoulders high.” Wharton was “alone in her own class … among that handful of English-speaking novelists … whose books are the chief literary events of our day.” While some considered her subject (fashionable high life) too narrow and modish, prophecies of her future standing proved just. After a slight dip of reputation, in the mid-twentieth century after her death in 1937, Wharton has continued to command a wide following and maintained her established status as one of the most important American novelists. No single text could possibly encapsulate her career (in forty years, she published more than forty volumes, any one of which rewards discussion), but with this novel as an entry point, this chapter will attempt simply to give a sense of her remarkable scope and diversity.

Launched in January 1905, as a monthly serial in the popular Scribner’s Magazine, Wharton’s story of the high-maintenance Miss Bart, a husband-hunting socialite, flirting, gambling, and, in private, smoking, her way through the Manhattan smart set, captured its audience from the start, and published as a book, in October, with the much-anticipated final installment looming, it became an instant bestseller, breaking all Scribner’s records, and making Wharton famous. The House of Mirth was Wharton’s second novel, and she herself would come to view it as her much delayed, professional breakthrough (the first episode appeared in the month of her forty-third birthday). Seeing her early chapters in print, when she was still working out the later ones, forced her, so she claimed, into the discipline essential to a writer; she learned how to bring complex materials under control, and to steer a work to its close.

“I – I’m losted,” sobs six-year-old David Shearl in Henry Roth’s (1906–95) novel Call It Sleep (1934), as a passerby on New York’s Lower East Side tries to help the quivering child, who cannot find his way back home. Although he can answer her question, “Don’t you know where you live?” with a specific address, this information is useless because neither she nor the policeman at the local precinct can discern the name of the street from his heavily accented English. David knows that he lives at “A hunner ‘n’ twenny six Boddeh Stritt” (99), which could be anything from Potter to Bahrdee, or as the Irish cop tells his mother when she arrives at the station, “I’m thinkin’ ye’d best put a tag on him, fer he sure had us up a tree with his Pother an’ Body an’ Powther!” (106). On the margins of the manuscript of Call It Sleep, Roth scribbled various ways of transcribing the sound of this unnamed street as voiced by a sobbing child, ending with “Body Street,” the mother’s body as the ultimate home that a six-year-old lost on the streets of New York would be seeking. Yet when his mother arrives at the station, we understand along with David that his mother is also lost, for this immigrant, whose conversations with her son prior to this scene convey her intelligence, sensitivity, and eloquence, can barely utter, “T’anks so viel!” (106). We suddenly grasp that up to this moment her speech has been rendered to us in a nuanced and lyrical English that has actually been a translation from an absent Yiddish original, in her mother tongue. Infantilized as an immigrant, Genya Shearl can no longer fully protect her own child in a world in which she herself cannot find her way.

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) published his first novel in 1820, and his last, thirty-second novel in 1850. During most of his three-decade career he was among the world’s most famous and, particularly in the 1820s, widely read writers. By the twentieth century he was best known as the author of The Leather-Stocking Tales, five novels about Natty Bumppo, a hunter, woodsman, and frontier warrior whose closest friendship is with Chingachgook, a chief of the dispossessed Delaware tribe. Variously called Leather-stocking, Hawkeye, Pathfinder, and Deerslayer, Natty has often been cited as the first quintessentially American literary hero, and the Tales, set against historical contexts that range from the pre-Revolutionary fighting between England and France to the Lewis and Clark Expedition, have struck many as a kind of prose epic of early American life. Natty’s adventures in the woods are often drenched in violence and suspense. Cooper’s own heroism is harder to see, especially so long after the fact. We are used to thinking of the United States as the world’s great superpower, but when Cooper began writing the nation was still struggling with its status as a former colony of Great Britain, the superpower of that era. Cooper was the first American author to earn a living writing fiction, yet his work also reveals how much a postcolonial culture has to contend with in its quest for nationality.

Cooper’s first Leather-Stocking Tale was his third novel, The Pioneers, published in 1823. The story it tells begins on Christmas Eve, that moment on which for Christians human history pivots from the old world defined by Adam’s fall and Mosaic law to the new one brought forth by the birth of a savior who opens up the possibility of redemption. The setting is an upstate New York village called Templeton, which is based very closely on Cooperstown, the settlement founded by the novelist’s father in the 1780s and the scene of his own childhood. Natty appears in the book’s first chapter. This initial appearance gives little hint of the role he ended up playing in either Cooper’s career or American literature: he is an old man who soon disappears into the woods, while the narrative moves forward into the town where “the pioneers” are busy civilizing the wilderness.

John Updike (1932–2009) has stood as a major figure in the American literary landscape since the 1950s – of his contemporaries, only Philip Roth has been there as long. Updike emerged in his early twenties as the Wunderkind from Shillington, Pennsylvania, a gifted stylist with a lyric love of the surface world. As one reviewer wrote in 1960, “Updike frequently gives the impression that he has six or seven senses, all of them operating at full strength.” The early writing, which covered a Pennsylvania boyhood and early married life, was marked by keen visual detail, a mastery of image and metaphor, and revelation of how significance resides within the ordinary. The words also poured out rapidly. Short stories, poems, and articles by Updike were appearing in the New Yorker every few weeks.

By age forty Updike had published sixteen books, including Rabbit, Run (1960), The Centaur (1963), and Couples (1968), and he was already the subject of multiple volumes of literary criticism, something unheard of for such a young writer. A resident of Massachusetts since 1957, he had become a New Englander, as was increasingly reflected in settings and characters found in his work. His subject matter, most often aligned with family life, marriage, and domesticity, had turned more explicitly to sexuality and adultery, as well as the ways in which American culture and politics shape one’s domestic existence.

Born in 1899 in Illinois, Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) came of age during World War I. Rejected by the army because of his defective vision, he volunteered as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy and was seriously wounded. He returned home for a brief stay, married and sailed with his wife to France where he settled in Paris and became part of a loose fraternity of American expatriate writers, among them Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound, who in various ways influenced his art. As a journalist, he covered the Spanish civil war between the republican government and the fascist Falangists led by Franco. An outdoorsman, he hunted big game in Africa, fished in the waters of Key West and found the spectacle of the matador’s artful encounter with the bull an analogue to his own art. All this activity found its way into his writing as journalist, short story writer, novelist and memoirist. Petrina Crockford vividly sums up the heroic legend that Hemingway fashioned for himself: “He lived a vigorous, adventurous life as brash and uncompromising as that of his greatest characters, inhabiting a male dominated, solitary, and stoic world.” The trouble with the legend, as I hope to show, is that by simplifying his achievement it fails to do it full justice.

Hemingway began his literary career as a short story writer and became one of its greatest masters. No one has better characterized his style than Hemingway himself. “The dignity of the movement of an iceberg is due to one-eighth of its being above water.” His sentences are characteristically crisp, understated (spare in their use of adjectives and adverbs) and resonant, requiring the reader to see and hear what is below the water. The protagonist of his first collection of stories, In Our Time, mostly set in the American Midwest, is the young Nick Adams. “Indian Camp” is exemplary of the iceberg effect. Nick accompanies his father, a doctor, to an Indian camp, where he is to perform without anesthesia a cesarean operation on an Indian squaw. Nick averts his eyes as his father accomplishes the task with admirable skill, but with a less appealing bravado.

Willa Cather (1873–1947) is one of a handful of undeniably “classic” American authors. Where many of the most cherished American novelists are known primarily for having written one novel that is read again and again, Cather wrote several. The Prairie Trilogy of O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), My Antonia (1918), along with A Lost Lady (1923), My Mortal Enemy (1926), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) compose a list of works that would be the envy of virtually any other twentieth-century novelist. Among American novelists, only Henry James and William Faulkner can be said to have written a greater number of novels of enduring value than Cather. My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop stand beside The Scarlet Letter (1850), Moby-Dick (1851), Huckleberry Finn (1884), and Invisible Man (1952) as essential literary works that seem to ask and definitely answer the question of what it has meant to try to be American. Cather may be the most truly “national” writer in the American literary tradition, though as a literary artist her work was uncompromisingly original. Were we to imagine that all of American literature had been bound and contained within a single library and that by some terrible misfortune that library had been set ablaze, the survival of Cather’s works perhaps more than those of any other American writer would speak to future readers and allow them to imagine the challenges and disappointments faced by strangers come together from foreign lands to wrest from nature and each other a civilization that was itself the pursuit of an ideal. She was America’s elegist and, as a novelist, its epic poet.

Cather is known as the writer of Nebraska, a master of the native tongue that became the language of the American plains. Equally important, Cather was profoundly writing within the larger tradition of the novel of James and Hawthorne as well as Tolstoy, Flaubert, and Balzac.