The 20th Century in Literature

[kelby_lake]

For each decade, 1900-1990, give the work you think was seminal in the evolution of literature now/at that time OR best represents that decade?

[semi-fly]

I'm curious to see what other titles people can think of to represent the 1920s - 1940s. My choices are pretty obvious, so they didn't take a great deal of thought on my part.

1900s - The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
1910s - The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
1920s - The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
1930s - Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
1940s - Animal Farm by George Orwell
1950s - On The Road by Jack Kerouac
1960s - To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
1970s - This Perfect Day by Ira Levin
1980s - The Most Beloved of Earthlings by Marin Preda
1990s - The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi

[LitNetIsGreat]

[FONT="Trebuchet MS"]I'm curious to see what other titles people can think of to represent the 1920s - 1940s. My choices are pretty obvious, so they didn't take a great deal of thought on my part.


Woolf, Eliot or Joyce, again pretty obvious choices, I think it is very difficult to be concrete about the later stuff.

[JBI]

For the century as a whole in English, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Everything else seems but a footnote.

I won't attempt one work for each decade, as it is too difficult. One wants to Put Lu Xun in there, while still mentioning Faulkner, and to be honest, there are two many great authors in different languages to really cover. I just thought I'd drop The Waste Land, because it essentially shaped everything that came after it for the next 50 years.

[mortalterror]

Wikipedia has this list of notable books published by year:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_years_in_literature

Also, I'm not sure it's exactly what you want but last year I made a list of American writers by generation to see how they stacked up against each other and this is what I came up with. Keep in mind that authors reached their peaks at different ages and so writers don't always share the movement normally associated with their decade's generation. This list isn't complete as it does not include writers of drama or poetry.

Generation of the 70s
Eggers

Generation of the 60s
Palahniuk, Ellis, Wallace

Generation of the 50s
McInerny, Card

Generation of the 40s
Auster

Generation of the 30s
Roth, McCarthy, Updike, Pynchon, Wolfe, Barth, DeLillo, Doctorow, Morrison, Gardner, Gardner, Plath, Zelazny

Generation of the 20s
Kerouac, Bellow, Vonnegut, Salinger, Heller, Mailer, Styron, Jones, Ginsberg, Bukowski, Bradbury, Herbert, Asimov, O'Connor

Generation of the 10s
Auden, Ellison, Wright, Burroughs

Generation of the 00s
Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Nabokov, Wolfe, Dos Passos, Miller, Heinlein, Singer(Polish born), Rand

Generation of the 1890s
Miller

Generation of the 1880s
Lewis, Woolf, Eliot, Pound, Lowell

Generation of the 1870s
Dreiser, Anderson, Cather, Crane, London, Norris

Generation of the 1860s
Wharton

Generation of the 1840s
James

Generation of the 1830s
Howells, Alcott, Twain

Generation of the 1810s
Melville, Stowe

Generation of 1800
Hawthorne

1780
Cooper

1770
Austen

1.Pride and Prejudice -Austen

1.The Last of the Mohicans -Cooper

1.The Scarlet Letter -Hawthorne

1.Moby Dick -Melville
2.Uncle Tom's Cabin -Stowe

1.Huckleberry Finn -Twain
2.The Rise of Silas Lapham -Howell
3.Little Women -Alcott

1.The Ambassadors -James

1.House of Mirth -Wharton

1.Sister Carrie -Dreiser
2.The Call of the Wild -London
3.My Antonia -Cather
4.The Red Badge of Courage -Crane
5.Winesberg, Ohio -Anderson
6.McTeague -Norris

1.Main Street -Lewis
2.Mrs. Dalloway -Woolf

1.Tropic of Cancer -Miller

1.The Old Man and the Sea -Hemingway
2.The Sound and the Fury -Faulkner
3.The Grapes of Wrath -Steinbeck
4.The Great Gatsby -Fitzgerald
5.Lolita -Nabokov (Russian born)
6.Look Homeward, Angel -Wolfe
7.USA -Dos Passos
8.Atlas Shrugged -Rand

1.Invisible Man -Ellison
2.Black Boy -Wright
3.Naked Lunch -Burroughs

1.On the Road -Kerouac
2.Seize the Day- Bellow (Canadian born)
3.Slaughterhouse-Five -Vonnegut
4.The Catcher in the Rye -Salinger
5.Catch-22 -Heller
6.The Naked and the Dead -Mailer
7.Sophie's Choice -Styron
8.From Here to Eternity -Jones

1.The Crying of Lot 49 -Pynchon
2.Beloved -Morrison
3.Rabbit Run -Updike
4.Blood Meridian -McCarthy
5.Portnoy's Complaint -Roth
6.White Noise -DeLillo
7.Bonfire of the Vanities -Wolfe
8.Ragtime -Doctorow
9.The Floating Opera -Barth
10.Grendel -Gardner
11.Fat City -Gardner
12.The Bell Jar -Plath

1.City of Glass -Auster

1.Bright Lights, Big City- McInerny
2.Ender's Game -Card

1.Fight Club -Palahniuk
2.American Psycho -Ellis
3.Infinite Jest -Wallace

1.A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius -Eggers

[JCamilo]

Not to mention it do really seems like the first 4 centuries are considerable more productive and with a stronger impact than the last four... (and some guys like Fernando Pessoa, Kafka, Borges had their impact after the decade when those works are produced...)

[stlukesguild]

1900s- Kipling- Kim, Just So Stories
1910s- Proust- In Search of Lost Time (1913-1922)
1920s- Joyce- Ulysses, T.S. Eliot- The Wasteland, Kafka- Short Stories, The Trial, The Castle
1930s- Pablo Neruda- Residence on Earth, Faulkner- As I Lay Dying
1940s- J.L. Borges- Ficciones, El Aleph
1950s- Samuel Beckett- The End Game, Waiting for Godot Saul Bellow- Augie March, Seize the Day
1960s- Gunter Grass- The Danzig Trilogy (The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, Dog Years), Julio Cortazar- Blow Up and Other Stories, Hopscotch
1970s- Italo Calvino- Invisible Cities
1980s- Cormac McCarthy- Blood Meridian
1990s- Jose Saramago- Blindness, Don Delillo- Underworld, Thomas Pynchon- Mason & Dixon

[sixsmith]

1900's Sister Carrie - Theodore Dreiser
1910's The Metamorphosis - Kafka
1920's Ulysses - James Joyce
1930's Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
1940's The Outsider - Albert Camus
1950's Lolita - Vladimir Nabakov
1960's Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
1970's Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
1980's White Noise - Don DeLillo
1990's Sabbath's Theatre - Philip Roth

[WICKES]

I think Evelyn Waugh and Aldous Huxley captured the inter war years very well- as far as Britain was concerned anyway. Although both focus on the British or English upper classes.

Huxley is great for a look at the ideas preoccupying the intellectual upper class. There is a great passage in 'Those Barren Leaves' where an English guest in an Italian Villa says:

"I don't see that it would be possible to live in a more exciting age...The sense that everything's perfectly provisional and temporary- everything, from social institutions to what we've hitherto regarded as the most sacred scientific truths- the feeling that nothing, from the Treaty of Versailles to the rationally explicable universe, is really safe, the intimate conviction that anything may happen, anything may be discovered- another war, the artificial creation of life, the proof of continued existence after death- why it's all infinitely exhilirating

Evelyn Waugh is often thought of as a light or comic novelist, but Vile Bodies (for example) is a very unnerving novel which really nailed the emptiness and nihilism underlying the roaring '20s.

George Orwell would have to be on any list for the 1930s. His books explore the big issues of the day- economic depression and poverty, the rise of fascism, the danger of dictatorship, the broken dream of communism etc. He was a great man who really experienced his times too: educated at Eton but living as a tramp in Paris and London, as a miner in northern England, fighting in the Spanish civil war and so on. Give me Orwell over that posturing show off and bully Hemingway any day.

Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf is another novel that explores inter war nihilism and despair/ loss of meaning and old certainties etc

[kelby_lake]

Not to mention it do really seems like the first 4 centuries are considerable more productive and with a stronger impact than the last four... (and some guys like Fernando Pessoa, Kafka, Borges had their impact after the decade when those works are produced...)

No probs! Let's start a new thread then!

[mayneverhave]

1900s- Kipling- Kim, Just So Stories
1910s- Proust- In Search of Lost Time (1913-1922)
1920s- Joyce- Ulysses, T.S. Eliot- The Wasteland, Kafka- Short Stories, The Trial, The Castle
1930s- Pablo Neruda- Residence on Earth, Faulkner- As I Lay Dying
1940s- J.L. Borges- Ficciones, El Aleph
1950s- Samuel Beckett- The End Game, Waiting for Godot Saul Bellow- Augie March, Seize the Day
1960s- Gunter Grass- The Danzig Trilogy (The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, Dog Years), Julio Cortazar- Blow Up and Other Stories, Hopscotch
1970s- Italo Calvino- Invisible Cities
1980s- Cormac McCarthy- Blood Meridian
1990s- Jose Saramago- Blindness, Don Delillo- Underworld, Thomas Pynchon- Mason & Dixon

The list that I would come up with is oddly similar to this. It's apparent that the 10's and 20's are relatively easy to choose, but the 00's are slightly deficient. For the 20's, if you don't choose Eliot you can still choose Joyce, then Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kafka, ad infinitum.

[JCamilo]

No probs! Let's start a new thread then!

Nah, threads do not need to follow a straigth line :D

[bazarov]

None; because of different aspects on world, life and literature in whole world.

[Etienne]

1900's Apolinnaire's Alcools
1910's Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Bely's Petersburg, Apolinnaire's Caligrammes
1920's Gide's The Counterfeiters, Joyce's Ulysses, Kafka's work in general, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Valery's M. Teste, Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, Woolf's To the Lighthouse, T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, Breton's Nadja
1930's Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Celine - Travel to the End of the Night, Musil's Man Without Qualities
1940's Borges' Fictions, Levi's If this is a Man
1950's Rulfo's Pedro Paramo, Nabokov's Lolita, Beckett's The Unnamable
1960's Cortazar's Rayuela, Garcia Marquez's A Hundred Years of Solitude, Bulgakov's Master and Margarita
1970's Perec's Life: A User's Manual, Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
1980's Pessoa's The Book of Disquietude

I probably missed a couple of books there though...