The American Canon

American literature is set apart from other literatures from around the world

because of the political and socioeconomically driven themes that are unique to the United

States. Regionalism is prevalent in the works of authors such as Willa Cather, William

Faulkner, and John Steinbeck, who portray both the successes and devastating failures of

characters who are bound to their land in rural America. Realism is also popular in

American literature, and African American authors Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston

utilize regional dialects to accurately and often painfully portray characters who are

oppressed and terrorized by racism and inequality. Mass immigration into the United

States provides a wealth of unique ethnic voices in American Literature, with countless

novels, plays, and poems being based on the innumerable cultures that have been

assimilated into American culture. Allen Ginsberg employs Confessionalism in a radical

departure from the formerly strict rules of poetry and prose, to depict the horrors of the

marginalized in American society. Sylvia Plath is also a Confessionalist, whose personal

tragedies take center stage in poetry that tears down the accepted stereotypes of women as

merely mothers and nurturers, made so popular in the American media, and reveals a

personal pain that results from the inability to conform to the American ideal of the perfect

woman. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood departs from traditional non-fiction with the

author’s social, economical, and psychological investigation not merely of a crime but of the

criminals who commit them, with American society playing a pivotal role in their

transformation from men to murderers.

Regionalism and Dialect

The genius of William Faulkner lies in his ability to articulate the voices of rural

Americans who are set apart from Americans in other parts of the country because of their

distinct southern behaviors and dialect. As I Lay Dying follows a family in their pursuit to

bury their dead; crippled by poverty, however, they are forced to live with the dead body

through storms both literal and metaphorical in scenes familiar to the poor and uneducated

in the Deep South. The Deep South is, in fact, an icon in American Literature. The Civil

War, slavery, racism, and the Civil Rights Movement, are all unique to the American

experience, and tales of life in the Deep South are featured in countless novels in the

American literary canon. The work of African American author Richard Wright examines

the terrors of racism in the Deep South, with characters who are lynched, beaten, and

burned to death, often for crimes that they did not commit, but more accurately, simply

because they were black. In “The Man Who Was Almost A Man,” Wright presents the

reality of inequality in the American South for a young black boy who dreams of achieving a

semblance of power by owning a gun:

The first movement he made the following morning was to reach

under his pillow for the gun. In the gray light of dawn he held it

loosely, feeling a sense of power. Could kill a man with a gun like

this. Kill anybody, black or white. And if he were holding his gun

in his hand, nobody could run over him; they would have to respect

him

(Wright 2070-2071).

Richard Wright’s America is an infestation of cruelty and hatred where the promise of

freedom is all too often broken, and the future is as bleak as any horror of the past.

Zora Neale Hurston, like Richard Wright, depicts black life in the American South as

a thing separate from any other American experience. Hurston’s characters are equally

poor and uneducated as any of Wright’s characters, but she places her people in the all-

black town of Eatonville, Florida, where blacks rule their own community with little

intrusion from whites. In “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Hurston refuses to submit to

the racism that surrounds her:

“Besides the waters of the Hudson” I feel my race. Among a thousand

white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and over-swept, but

through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am;

and the ebb but reveals me again… At certain times

I have no race, I am me… I have no separate feeling about being an

American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great

Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong

(1711-1712).

Hurston and Wright, like Faulkner, equip their characters with regional dialects that are

instrumental to both the theme and tone of their work. The African American Vernacular is

vital to Hurston’s and Wright’s characters as their speech makes known the vast

differences between blacks and whites at this time in America, and further identifies them

as an oppressed people.

Racism and oppression abound in the American literary canon and they are also

prevalent in the works of Modernist poets Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen; poets who

are typically identified with the Harlem Renaissance Movement. Hughes is well known for

his use of jazz and the blues in his poetry, both of which are American musical innovations

created by African Americans. Cullen is deeply political and his many protest-poems focus

on racism and injustice; in his poem “Incident,” the speaker of the poem encounters racism

while riding on a Baltimore bus:

Once riding in old Baltimore, / Heart-filled, head-filled with glee/

I saw a Baltimorian / Keep looking straight at me / Now I was

eight and very small / And he was no whit bigger / And so I

smiled, but he poked out / His tongue, and called me, “Nigger”

(Cullen 2061).

The poetry of Langston Hughes is rooted in the African American experience;

hardened by the memories of slavery and political oppression, and colored with black

culture forms of jazz, blues, and spirituals. Hughes, like Cullen and Wright, exposes racism

as an impenetrable evil that stalks African Americans who dream of one day being free.

“The Weary Blues” is one of many Hughes poems that read like a song, with beats born

from the blues, and in a clear black voice that is distinctly American:

In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone / I heard that

Negro sing, that old piano moan / “Ain’t nobody in this world /

Ain’t got nobody but ma self / I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’ /

And put mah troubles on de shelf”

(Hughes 2029).

In “Advanced, repressed, and popular: Langston Hughes during the Cold War,” critic

Jonathan Scott explores Hughes political views, especially his links to Communism, to

present not only his poetic methods, but also the political purpose behind much of his

writing. Scott’s assessment of Hughes’ literary methods reveals that, “he served as a Black

national advocate for international Socialism, mainly through his journalism and poetry,

while as an artist he asserted the international scale of the American national struggle to

abolish racial oppression, precisely by making his interventions at the level of national

popular culture and through the formation of national popular aesthetic tastes and

preferences” (Scott 39). Hughes’ America is one wrought with political oppression and the

struggle of black Americans to tear down the boundaries that imprison them in segregation

and Jim Crow laws.

Oppression and the American Dream

Oppression in America is by no means limited to racism against African Americans.

Poverty and lack of education are the driving forces behind oppression against all

Americans and this is made painfully clear in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The

Joad family is forced off their land and onto the American highway in the search of the

American Dream in California. Like the Deep South, the American Dream is a literary icon

that permeates the work of numerous American authors, including Steinbeck. But the

American Dream is typically an unattainable one, especially for the impoverished and

uneducated, and the road to success is paved with hunger, death, and disappointment. The

American West, like the Deep South, is a character in itself, one that fails to keep its

promises, whether of gold or of glory. The Grapes of Wrath reveals the reality that the

American Dream is not simply up for grabs, a free-for-all, or a legal right. The Joad family is

duped by propaganda and they take to the road believing that the land of California is

bursting with economic opportunities. Of course, the Joad’s realize early on in their

journey that they have been deceived, but they choose to move forward in their travels

because they have nothing at home for which to return. Steinbeck, having personally

visited the migrant camps, provides insight into the desperation and despair of the

thousands of Americans who left their dusty lands in search of the American Dream:

They were hungry, and they were fierce. And they had hoped to

find a home, and they found only hatred… The owners hated them.

And in the towns, the storekeepers hated them because they had no

money to spend… The town men, little bankers, hated Okies because

there was nothing to gain from them. They had nothing. And the laboring

people hated Okies because a hungry man must work, and if he must

work, if he has to work, the wage payer automatically gives him less

for his work; and then no one can get more

(Steinbeck 318).

The Joad family, like millions of Americans, will never see the American Dream come to

fruition, and they watch in terror as their dreams, like their lands, turn to dust.

The short stories and novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald often focus on the American

Dream. Fitzgerald, however, concentrates not on the difficulty of achieving the American

Dream, but rather the failure of morals in those people who have, financially, realized this

dream. Critic John F. Callahan asserts that Fitzgerald’s ideal of the American Dream, “led to

the extravagant promise identified with America and the intense, devastating loss felt when

the dream fails in one or another of its guises” (Callahan 374). Like Hemingway,

Fitzgerald’s characters are often lacking in the personal character that is required to

sustain dignity and self-control in the face of wild success. Like the author himself,

Fitzgerald’s characters often succumb to excess, in terms of financial irresponsibility and,

occasionally, alcoholism. In “Winter Dreams,” Judy Jones is a lonely child of tremendous

wealth, whose boredom with the life of a debutante results in base cruelties and usury of

numerous male companions. Judy Jones is a stock Fitzgerald female character: she is

beautiful and mesmerizing, and with few other qualities which are deserving of affection:

She had inflicted on him the innumerable little slights and

indignities possible in such a case- as if revenge for having

ever cared for him at all. She had beckoned him and beckoned

him again and he had responded often with bitterness and

narrowed eyes. She had brought him ecstatic happiness and

intolerable agony of spirit.

(Fitzgerald 1833).

Fitzgerald’s women often slowly and painfully unravel the men who love them, men who

have achieved economic success, (the American Dream) but who lack the ability to refuse

the advances of beautiful women who are also lacking in the area of dignity. These, like

many of Hemingway’s characters, are without aim or purpose. Women in American

literature underwent a transformation at the height of Modernism; she was no longer a

cook, nurse, and housekeeper, but a force to be reckoned with.

American Woman

The Grapes of Wrath presents the family matriarch as the soul of the family unit; a

woman who cannot be buried by the oppression of her husband or her sons, and who leads

her family on their journey west, in the hopes of finding work amidst the hunger and

desperation of the Dust Bowl migrations. Ma Joad begins as a motherly figure, one who

spends most of her time cooking and caring for her family, yet she manages to take over the

role that her husband originated as leader of the family, as Pa Joad’s spirit weakens from

failure and the inhumane treatment his family receives from political forces. The Joad

family represents the stock Midwestern American family, for whom education was forgone

in favor of tilling their land, and family was the heart and soul of every man, woman, and

child.

The family matriarch is a staple of American literature as she survives hardship

after hardship and leads her family by powerful female intuition and the unwavering love

of a wife and mother. Critic Nellie Y. McKay examines the role of the wife and mother in

American literature. McKay contends that Ma Joad represents the typical American

woman, a woman who spends her life catering to the emotional and physical needs of her

husband and her children, regardless of her own needs; she cooks, cleans, nurses, and

submits. McKay writes that the “equation of the American land with women’s biological

attributes did much to foster the widespread use of literary images of women as one with

the “natural” propensities of a productive nurturing earth, and to erase, psychologically, the

difference between the biological and the social functions of women” (McKay 50). McKay,

however, fails to credit Ma Joad for her triumphant victory over the will of her husband, as

she demonstrates the ability to lead her family just as well, if not more effectively, than Pa

Joad. McKay states that, in the work of Steinbeck, “women, without whom the men would

have no world, have no independent identity of their own” (50). In fact, Ma Joad, although

driven by the necessity to provide for her children, does indeed develop the identity of a

woman whose input is valuable, and whose guidance averts even further catastrophe. Ma

Joad arises from beyond the shadow of her husband, and like many modern American

women, refuses to be quieted.

Ma Joad cannot fully be considered to be an independent woman, but Modernist

authors embraced and further developed independent female characters who were once

unthinkable in male-dominated American literature. Fitzgerald’s female characters,

although often aloof and manipulating, are commonly independent characters. The

cunning Judy Jones of “Winter Dreams” and the lead female characters in Tender is the

Night are, with few exceptions, both financially and emotionally independent women who

lead men by their sexual prowess and powers of manipulation. This was a new idea in

American Literature; gone were the days of the kitchen slaves, forever bound by the strings

of their aprons, who singularly carried the burden of numerous children on their backs. In

poetry, Sylvia Plath defined what it meant to be a wife and a mother, and she did not

embrace, but rather rejected, the traditional roles of women.

Plath is a Confessional poet, a movement in American poetry pioneered by the likes

of Allen Ginsberg, and she revealed to readers her private pain and disappointment with

leading the life of a wife and a mother. Plath’s intellect, combined with artistic passions,

was, in her own words, asphyxiated by her matrimonial and motherly duties. In her poetry,

Plath removes the veil of what is deemed to be a natural inclination of motherly love, and

reveals that American women are, in fact, often unfulfilled by this role. In “The Applicant,”

Plath expresses resentment with the marginalization of women: “To fill it and willing / To

bring teacups and roll away headaches / And do whatever you tell it / Will you marry it?”

(Plath 2710, 11-14). Plath likens women to dolls who are playthings for men and who

must fulfill their roles as wives and mothers as they have been so long trained by American

society, and with images propagated by American media: “…In twenty-five years she’ll be

silver / In fifty, gold. / A living doll, everywhere you look. / It can sew, it can cook / It can

talk, talk, talk” (2710, 31-35). Plath’s intimate poems, in concert with her private and

personal pain, continuously challenged American ideals of femininity and grace, and

offered to American literature, a portrait of the modern American women.

The poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks is permeated with the social injustices suffered by

African Americans in the 20th Century, but it also offers poems with feminine themes and,

like Plath, she does not agree with or submit to the American female ideal. In “the Mother,”

Brooks’ brutal honesty about the realities of abortion both defends women’s rights, and

reveals the agony that accompanies the decision to abort, as well as the psychological

effects, and the aftermath of making such a decision: “You will never neglect or beat /

Them, or silence or buy with a sweet / You will never wing up the sucking-thumb / Or

scuttle off ghosts that come” (Brooks 2411, 5-8). Brooks and Plath share distaste for the

expectancies of motherhood in America and the constraints that it puts on modern women.

Ultimately, these poets lift the veil of domesticity and reveal the face of the modern woman,

one who has finally broken into the once male-dominated society of American Literature.

Heroes, Hipsters, and Outlaws

Wrath’s Tom Joad represents, in a new fashion, the all-American hero. But Tom Joad

is not a soldier or a saint, he is a criminal who spent five years in prison for second degree

murder, and a man who refuses to be battered by the system that not only placed him in

prison, but also abuses his family as well as thousands of others, who seek, but do not find,

aid during the mass migration. Tom Joad is an American hero in the spirit of Hemingway, a

man who fights, drinks, loves, and fails gracefully and without complaint. Tom Joad,

however, is not the only proud and fighting man in The Grapes of Wrath, as there is no

shortage of proud Americans men who are being shoved off their land, and they articulate

themselves in a distinctly Midwestern American dialect:

“Oh! They talked pretty about it. You know what kinda years

we been havin’. Dust comin’ up and spoilin’ ever’thing so a man

didn’t get a crop to plug up an ant’s ass. An’ ever’body got bills

at the grocery. You know how it is… So they tractored all the tenants

off the lan.’ All ‘cept me, an’ by God I ain’t goin’

(Steinbeck 64).

Tom Joad’s journey is a prevalent theme in American literature- the hero’s journey that is

accompanied by adversity, hunger, oppression, and the curse of the luckless. Faulkner’s As

I Lay Dying, Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and the

combined works of Jack Kerouac, are “journey” themed novels. Visibly absent in these

works is the chivalrous gentleman, the wealthy romantic, and the sensitive Lord of British

Literature. The new American hero is often without financial stability, void of material

possessions, if not wholly apathetic to them, romantically unattached, and oppressed for

one reason or another. Hemingway and Kerouac’s characters often share the vices of their

authors, as alcohol-driven escapades abound in their journey tales, and excesses physically

exhaust their characters. Kerouac’s Big Sur examines both the necessity of escaping the

modern American world, and also embracing the excitement of urban life in America:

… I can see him rubbing his hands in anticipation of another big wild binge

with me like we had the year before when he drove me back to New York

from the West Coast, with George Baso the little Japanese Zen master

hepcat sitting crosslegged on the back mattress of Dave’s Jeepster…

a terrific trip through Las Vegas, St. Louis, stopping off at expensive

motels and drinking nothing but the best Scotch out of the bottle all

the way—

(Kerouac 2449)

Kerouac is commonly referred to as the father of the so-called Beat Generation, an artistic

movement that was epitomized by freewheeling artists that included Allen Ginsberg, and

which flourished and was born out of disillusionment with World War II. The Beat

Generation shares features with the Lost Generation of Hemingway’s time- a product of the

disillusion with the First World War, as characters travel aimlessly throughout the United

States and through Europe, engaging in casual sex, habitual drinking, and searching, often

listlessly, for a greater purpose in life. Hemingway’s characters, like many of Kerouac’s, are

overtly masculine, a typical representation of the American male, as in the case of

Steinbeck’s Tom Joad. But Hemingway’s American male characters are often associated

with World War I, and this gives birth to male characters who have been both physically

and emotionally wounded in the war. Kerouac avoids tales of war, possibly because of his

aversion to it, but Hemingway embraces the subject of American war in his work. What

Kerouac and Hemingway have most in common are characters who are always on the

move, traveling and exploring, and paying the price for their volatility. In “The Snows of

Kilimanjaro,” a man on the verge of death muses over a life wasted and stunted by leisure

and excess:

He had destroyed his talent himself… He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, by hook and by crook

(Hemingway 1988).

The spiritual journey, manifested by extensive traveling throughout America and beyond, is

an American literary staple that examines the human experience; restless wanderers seek,

and often do not find, love, happiness, and economic success. The traveling man is often

painted as a hero; not because he triumphs over the challenges on the road, but because he

goes on, and on, and on, and rarely stops to pity himself. Hemingway and Kerouac’s

characters are often a threat only to themselves, and their moral compasses are not only

misaligned, but rarely referred to for direction. The indifference of these characters cause

only minor harm, but the spiritually lost in America are often dehumanized, as is made

painfully clear in Ginsberg’s “Howl,” and for some, indifference and emptiness results in

violence, as in the case of the morally and psychologically bankrupt in Capote’s In Cold

Blood.

American Tragedy

Ginsberg’s “Howl” is a literary assault on the tepid Eisenhower years. The American

suburb was illustrative of economic success and a pretty portrait of the American family.

This picture, however, did not reveal the realities of American life outside of these suburbs.

Racism was alive and well in America as segregation continued to impinge on the basic

human rights of African Americans. Poverty, although largely ignored in light of the

supposed American dream being available to anyone who asked after World War II, was

rampant, and young people in America were frustrated and unsatisfied with the American

ideal that did not apply to them. In “Howl,” Ginsberg reveals, often in horrific detail, those

segments of society that are marginalized and abused; this included homosexuals, blacks,

Jews, and the mentally ill. Like Eliot’s “Wasteland,” Ginsberg examines a world gone wrong,

corrupted, and nightmarish, and his portrait of American life is in stark contrast to what

white American’s believed it to be. Madness, drugs, poverty, and hopelessness infected the

“best minds of my generation” (2756, 1) and “who sailed out of their windows in despair,

fell out of the subway window, jumped in the Passaic, leaped on Negroes, cried all over the

street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records… and threw

up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal

steamwhistles” (Ginsberg 2579-2580, 64-69). Ginsberg’s America was not the fantasy

propagated by the Eisenhower administration, but rather was the terrible reality of

American life that was ignored by popular media. Ginsberg’s apocalyptic vision and

representation of the hidden streets and alleys of America is, in the words of critic Jason

Shnider, “[r]obust, rude, and tender, with provocatively rhythmic music, the poem’s long-

lined construct of visual imagery and repetitive altering phrases was born out of the

various influences of American jazz, blues and rock n’ roll, formalism and free verse…”

(Shnider 1). Ginsberg’s telling of the ignored and abandoned set the stage for the mass

migration of young people to San Francisco, where hippies, runaways, and artists followed

in the footsteps of Ginsberg, the poet-prophet who foresaw the disintegration of American

life in the 1960’s.

American life was dramatically altered in the 1960’s and American authors

responded to the breakdown in the traditional family and its values, which often resulted in

the corruption of the young; many of these young people no longer believed in the

American Dream, and they took matters into their own hands, often in the form of violence.

The death of the all-American-family that was broken by divorce and childhood abuse, is at

the heart of the violence in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. The brutal crime committed on

the Clutter family is the result of social and familial chaos. Dick Hickock and Perry Smith,

two poor, uneducated, aimless, and heartless criminals, shatter a quiet Mid-Western

American town when they terrorize and pointlessly murder and innocent family. Capote

penetrates the psychology of the two murderers and thoughtfully provides insight into the

minds of the criminals. Perry and Dick are humanized by Capote’s examination of their

backgrounds, particularly their childhoods, and, unthinkable as it is, the reader has the

potential to sympathize with these murderers because it is clear that family and society

plays a role in the demise of the human conscience. Perry’s background is filled with

alcoholism, childhood neglect, and suicide. Dick, although from a seemingly good family,

may have been psychologically damaged by a near-fatal automobile accident, and this

disability leads to his criminal prowess. Critic Roger Berger, in his discussion of In Cold

Blood, asserts that “[t]hrough its deployment of narrative realism, an unstinting

verisimilitude, and the presentation of documents, the novel renders invisible the links

between the criminal justice system and its part in producing the chronic delinquent”

(Berger 184). Capote’s ability to arise empathy in the hearts of readers also brings to light

the issue of Capital Punishment in the United States, a judicial form of homicide that has

long been an accepted form of punishment in the United States.

Delinquent youth was on the rise in America at the writing of In Cold Blood, and this

was a direct result of the aftermath of war and the breakdown of traditional American

family values, as young people increasingly rejected the American ideal of the hardworking

family, and sought out non-traditional forms of existence. Critic George Garrett describes

the changing attitudes of Americans in the 1960’s was “our gradual change over from

concerns for victims to fascination with perpetrators” (Garrett 473). American life was

indeed changing in the 1960’s and authors like Capote revealed that these changes were a

product of the death of family values, which then gave birth to delinquents and murderers

who often carried years of abuse and social abandonment with them on the road to their

crimes.

The American literary canon is easily identifiable from other world literatures, and

what makes American Literature most unique is the social climate in which it was created.

Slavery, the Civil War, racism, immigration, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War,

and beyond; these are monuments in American Literature and they inspired some of the

most enduring works in literature around the world.

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