Modernism

Of Stein’s experiments, the prose-poem collection Tender Buttons (1914) may be the most charming. Organized into three sections–”Objects,” “Food,” and “Rooms”–the book renders the everyday unfamiliar. This, for example, is how she describes a box:

“Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle. So then the order is that a white way of being round is something suggesting a pin and is it disappointing, it is not, it is so rudimentary to be analysed and see a fine substance strangely, it is so earnest to have a green point not to red but to point again.”

Williams served the community of Rutherford, New Jersey, for 40 years as a family doctor. His medical practice kept him busy, but he also found it creatively inspiring.

“I was permitted by my medical badge to follow the poor, defeated body into those gulfs and grottos,” he mused. “It has fluttered before me for a moment, a phrase which I quickly write down on anything at hand, any piece of paper I can grab.” He jotted down ideas on prescription labels or typed them up between patient visits.

“I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eye. … Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world–I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”

– Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928)

Letters between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway show their close friendship during the 1920s.

Later on, their literary rivalry and mutually volatile personalities cooled their relationship.

As a teen, Hemingway worked on his school newspaper and went on to work at the Kansas City Star after graduating. “[You] were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence,” he later remembered. “This is useful to anyone.”

In 1937, by then an acclaimed novelist, Hemingway returned to journalism to report on the Spanish Civil War.

“[Brown] has made more than mere transcriptions of folk poetry, and he has done more than bring to it mere artistry; he has deepened its meanings and multiplied its implications. He has actually absorbed the spirit of his material, made it his own; and without diluting its primitive frankness and raciness, truly re-expressed it with artistry and magnified power. In a word, he has taken this raw material and worked it into original and authentic poetry.”

– James Weldon Johnson, preface to Southern Road by Sterling A. Brown (1932)

“Singer roamed the Upper West Side and conjured the lost world of Polish Jewry, its merchants and beggars, scholars and sinners, weaving a magic tapestry that included the survivors in New York. In this imagined world, the shtetls come vividly to life, but the American survivors seem doomed to wander through a haunted and unreal city–’shadows on the Hudson’ adrift between the shattered past and the realm of the dead.”

– Max Rudin, Vice President & Publisher, Library of America

“Native Son was like no other work of Black literature before it…. Never had the brute force of racism’s crushing impact up in a black consciousness been revealed before in fiction, certainly never with such starkness…. In a sense, the book performed a public, ritualized unveiling-the removal of the very mask of our blackness itself. Certainly the effect was like nothing before in the history of American letters.”

– Henry Louis Gates Jr., preface to Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (1993)

Himes’s work was notable for its bitter humor–”the hard, cynical wit of the urban poor,” as his biographer Edward Margolies put it. “It was the look on people’s faces when you asked them about a job. Most of ’em didn’t say right out they wouldn’t hire me. They just looked so goddamned startled that I’d even asked. As if some friendly dog had come in through the door and said, ‘I can talk.'”

– Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945)