america vs rest of world 1920-1939 literary rumble

[lord of the mark]

Perhaps this is aggressive, but i think it will be interesting.

to be American, must live in the US and write in English. Everyone else is "rest of world"

The period is too short for careers not to overlap. Therefore every writer who wrote a single major work in the period 1920-1939 counts. Though the more works they wrote in the period, the more it counts.

Again, lets keep it to fiction, poetry, drama (NOT musicals or operas). Essays only if their known primarily for style (thus Mencken is ok, but Freud is not)

[Sava]

stupid threads

[Cort Haus]

I claim P.G. Wodehouse for the ROTW please, even if he did live in the USA in some of that timeframe. The man was British, even if he did take US citizenship in 1954.

[Verto]

Originally posted by Sava
stupid threads

[Combat Ingrid]

That guy who wrote "The Hobbit".

[MosesPresley]

Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller, 1934. The first part of the book, the words just about leap off of the page, after that, it fizzles a bit. But it is still a classic, just on the strength of the early portion of the book alone.

"I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.

This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty ... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse...."

later

"They were eating a young chicken with wild rice. Pretended that I had eaten already, but I could have torn the chicken from the baby's hands. This is not just false modesty -- it's a kind of perversion, I'm thinking. Twice they asked me if I wouldn't join them. No! No! Wouldn't even accept a cup of coffee after the meal. I'm delicat, I am! On the way out I cast a lingering glance at the bones lying on the baby's plate -- there was still meat on them."

[KrazyHorse]

F Scott Fitzgerald

The US had him, the rest of the world didn't

The rest of the world therefore wins.

[molly bloom]

James Joyce: Ulysses publ. 1922, Finnegans Wake 1939.

Marcel Proust: 1920: Le cote de Guermantes (The Guermantes Way) and in 1922 Sodome et Gomorrhe (Cities of the Plain or Sodom and Gomorrah).

Anna Akhmatova: Podorozhnik (1921; "Plantain"), and Anno Domini MCMXXI (1922).

George Orwell: Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and Homage to Catalonia (1938).

William Butler Yeats: Four Plays for Dancers (1921), The Tower (1928)

Federico Garcia Lorca: Bodas de sangre (Madrid, 1935; Blood Wedding), Yerma (Buenos Aires, 1937), Poema del Cante Jondo (Madrid, 1931), and Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias (Madrid, 1935; tr. A. L. Lloyd, in Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter, and Other Poems, London, 1937)

Osip Mandelstam: Tristia (1922), The Noise of Time (1925) and a collection of essays, The Egyptian Stamp (1928).


Franz Kafka: A Hunger Artist (1924; Eng. trans., 1938),
The Trial (1925; Eng. trans., 1937) The Castle (1926; Eng. trans., 1930) and Amerika (1927; Eng. trans., 1938).

C. P. Cavafy: Piimata, or Poems of C. P. Cavafy in Alexandria, 1935.

Virginia Woolf: Jacob's Room (1922), To The Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931). Mrs. Dalloway (1925), A Room Of One's Own (1929), Three Guineas (1938) Orlando (1928).

D. H. Lawrence: Women In Love, 1920

Sartre: La Nausee 1938

Marguerite Yourcenar: Alexis ou le Trait?du Vain Combat (1929), A Coin In Nine Hands, 1934, Oriental Tales 1938, Le Coup de Grace (1939)

Isaac Babel: Red Cavalry 1926, Odessa Tales 1927

Borges: Inquisiciones, 1925 and Historia universal de la infamia, 1935

[Hueij]

Originally posted by molly bloom ...

Game, set and match methinks...

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Hueij

Game, set and match methinks...

Well, when you begin with the likes of Joyce and Proust, you know the heavy hitters are definitely on your side.

[Hueij]

The only American writer I can come up with for that time-frame is Dashiell Hammett

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Hueij

The only American writer I can come up with for that time-frame is Dashiell Hammett

There's Gertrude Stein and Faulkner and Hemingway springs to mind, unfortunately.

And Langston Hughes and the other writers of the Harlem Renaissance.


Our side: Mayakovsky and Louis Aragon, Thomas Mann and Samuel Beckett, Dylan Thomas and Siegfried Sassoon, W. H. Auden and Graham Greene, Robert Graves and Sean O'Casey, Robert Musil and Henry Green and Evelyn Waugh, Mikhail Bulgakov, Noel Coward and Elizabeth Bowen...

[Saras]

Bulgakov

[Dr Strangelove]

How about Steinbeck and Hemingway on the US side?

[lord of the mark]

Tennessee Williams

Flannery O'conner

O'henry

Ring lardner

HL Mencken

Thomas Wolfe

James Agee (who published some poetry in the 30's - though Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was published in 1941, despites its 30s themes. The 1939 cutoff keeps out Eudora Welty and several other southern writers)