Late Modernism and Its Discontents

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines the later work of these two canonical US modernist writers, who are treated as major figures in the sixth volume of this literary history, and the role that the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes played in the formation of their literary reputations as the pillars of “high modernism” in the United States. Canonizing Faulkner and Hemingway aligned well with the masculinist perspective that was implicit in this high modernist view, because both writers tended to focus on male protagonists struggling to assert both their individuality and their masculinity against hostile natural, social, and political environments. The chapter concludes by examining the work of Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac, who were both inspired and antagonized by the high modernism of Faulkner and Hemingway and who would, at least for a while, replace these writers on the center stage of the US literary scene.