Midwestern Writers - Literature by Region

The United States' Midwest ranks among the richest literary regions of the country, producing some of America's most respected and popular writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow, Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Twain, Carl Sandburg, John Dos Passos, Maya Angelou, David Mamet, Sam Shepherd, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen King and Abraham Lincoln, among others.

As a cultural region, the Midwest is not known for being avant garde or cutting edge. The reverse is probably true of Midwestern reputation in terms of popular culture and social mores. However, several of the writers who defined the direction of the literary arts (especially the novel) in America in the 20^th century grew up in the Midwest.

A son of Illinois, Ernest Hemingway(1899-1961) changed the tone of modern American literature, introducing not only a new way to look at high literature but a new way to look at American art. His clipped, fluid style of writing managed to hold back as much as it gave away while making for a gripping and often emotional read.

The balance of restraint and sentiment Hemingway achieved gave voice to a generation of American's who watched class divisions wash away in the aftermath of World War II and who recognized a need to redefine themselves along emotional and social lines. His (emotional) tug-of-war was his generation's tug-of-war.

Known as the greatest American short story writer, Hemingway produced a number of books of short stories beginning his critical success with the Nick Adams stories collected under the title, In Our Time. Other short story collections include Men Without Women and the posthumous A Moveable Feast. The novels of Ernest Hemingway are demonstrative of an equal sensibility, if not a superior one, to his short stories. A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, and For Whom the Bell Tollsare his best known novels.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), like Hemingway, wrote novels and short stories that were popular and literary at the same time. The degree of popularity and literary achievement that these two achieved has not been matched since their time.

Fitzgerald, a native of Minnesota, lived a famously decadent and disheveled life, appearing to fail in many non-literary pursuits all over the globe: failing at marriage with a rich and crazy wife, failing at sobriety, failing at becoming a mature adult. Then in the literary vein, he failed to become a successful screen-writer in Hollywood - as several other novelists did in the 1930's and 1940's (e.g. Faulkner).

The 20^th century witnessed several stellar authorial achievements by American writers; Fitzgerald best book was one of these.

In the same era that Faulkner created a catalogue of masterpieces constituting what amounts to his own literary language, so original was his approach to novel writing, F. Scott Fitzgerald achieved literary greatness and established himself in the American canon irrevocably with a single novel.

No book ranks above the F. Scott Fitzgerald's greatest work and singular masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. Set in a time and place where money and class meant everything, yet where the seams were coming undone and the stuffing in the great "pillow" of the upper class was falling out, this pitch perfect novel was full of insight, sharp prose, and a telling story that still resonates with complex meaning. As a novel, this is perhaps the best example of an American tragedy because it is concerned with illusion, self-created destiny, social hope and social despair and the spiritual angst that runs as an undercurrent beneath it all. The Great Gatsby harkens the awakening of a new American maturity, before the corporate world would insinuate itself into daily life but after this national (commercial) fate was sealed.

Originality was the hallmark of these two Midwestern writers. This need to be original is what drove Fitzgerald to attempt to recreate the novel in Tender is the Nightand same need would seem to explain Ernest Hemingway's occasional insistence on the idea that he had never read Tolstoy.

Another truly original 20^th century American voice to come from the Midwest was that of Saul Bellow (1915-2005).

The author of The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog married intellectual, philosophical and social ideas into a Chicagoan blend of high and low culture. His books are a joy ride of the mind, moving and jumping from Heidigger to Shakespeare to the South Side with an athletic, flexible prose that begs for re-reading.

Saul Bellow was a rather extremely celebrated novelist in his day, receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, the National Book Award and multiple Pulitzer Prizes (Samler's Planet & Humbolt's Gift).

Though Bellow is not as widely read today as he was twenty years ago and has not achieved a canonization on par with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, his writing is bound to make a popular and critical comeback because it is as pertinent to today's attention-span-challenged America as it was to the what-happened-to-family-the-business 1970's.

His novels include The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Seize the Day, Humbolt's Gift, and Henderson the Rain King.

Continuing the line of stylistically original and culturally relevant Midwestern novelists is Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007).

Hailing from Indiana, this writer fused science-fiction, memoir, and what might loosely be called the "protest novel" into a new form of novel. Kurt Vonnegut served in the army in World War II and used the subject of war in several of his novels. Slaughterhouse V portrays the strangeness and unthinking violence of war as does a much later novel Hocus Pocus.

In between these books, Vonnegut has written many short novels that set the individual of cynicism and integrity up against a group of profoundly ignorant, opinionated group-minded people. Cat's Cradle, Galapagos and Bluebeard are a few among his many novels.

His work is a bitingly cynical as it is amusing and humorous.

More recently, the Midwest has produced popular writer Stephen King (Indiana) and acclaimed writer Jonathan Franzen (Illinois) who takes the territories and culture of the Midwest as the subject for his heralded and rather dull novel The Corrections.

Perhaps we will deal with Mark Twain's regionalism and Theodore Dreiser's naturalism in another installment on Midwestern writers as well as some of the great poets to emerge from the Midwest like Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay and Maya Angelou.

The focus here has been on 20^th century novelists and so should rightly include some discussion of John Dos Passos, author of the USA trilogy.

In order to include Dreiser and Twain we would have to step further back in time and into pre-modernist writing. That will be fun, but it won't be today. Stay tuned.

Sources for dates:

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1954/hemingway-bio.html

http://www.biography.com/articles/Kurt-Vonnegut-9520329

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1976/bellow-bio.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Bellow

http://www.online-literature.com/fitzgerald/