Department of English

In this course we will study a variety of American novelists and short-story writers whose work appeared between the end of World War One in 1918 and the Great Depression in 1929. We will begin by reading novels by writers whose careers began in the late 19th century, such as Edith Wharton and Henry Blake Fuller. Then we will study the work of Willa Cather and the Jewish-American writer Anzia Yezierska. We will read the African-American writers Nella Larsen, W. E. B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston. We end the course by reading Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner. Topics include subjectivity, war, race and gender, the unconscious, and the politics of modernism.