NEW WORLD COMING by NATHAN MILLER

Author:NATHAN MILLER
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SCRIBNER
Published: 2003-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Harlem Renaissance’s celebration of the urban culture of the black masses did not sit well with the old black intelligentsia and members of the new, upwardly mobile middle class. While they accepted a romanticized version of black folklore and spirituals, they resented the emphasis by Hughes and others on the rawness of black life. Similar attacks were made against Van Vechten’s novel Nigger Heaven, both because of its title and subject matter, the way people lived in Harlem. In any event, the Great Depression put an end to Harlem’s Golden Age and its long descent into poverty, drugs, and crime began. Some critics, Mencken among them, lamented that no black writer had created a masterwork, but they forgot or overlooked the fact that the Harlem Renaissance was a protest movement as much as a literary movement. As such, it created a legacy of creativity that served as a beacon to succeeding generations.

For all the later emphasis on the lost generation and literary modernism, such writers as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Eliot were almost unknown to ordinary American readers in the 1920s. Gene Stratton-Porter, Harold Bell Wright, and Zane Grey were the most popular fiction writers of the day. Their books appeared sixteen times on the national best-seller lists between the end of the war and the Depression. * This trio may have been outsold by Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan books, the first of which was published in 1914, but they were not taken seriously enough to be ranked. Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, his most financially successful work, which appeared in 1920, sold about fifty thousand copies; sales of Harold Bell Wright’s The Re-Creation of Brian Kent, published that same year, approached a million copies.

Ordinary folk wanted escape from the present, and Porter, Wright, and Grey supplied escapist material. Wright’s books also had a strong religious tone. They began appearing before the war and reflected the rural values of the time. Plots and characters were one-dimensional—good always triumphed, evil was confounded—and they featured sexless romance. These books appealed to “the kind of American whose eyes glazed and even dampened when they thought of the good old days when life was simple and generally lived in close proximity to nature,” according to intellectual historian Roderick Nash.

Young, Harvard-educated Owen Wister, a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, introduced the western with The Virginian in 1902, and as the frontier faded into memory, Americans had an insatiable appetite for books about the West. Rex Beach, Emerson Hough, Peter B. Kyne, and James Oliver Curwood were familiar names to readers in the postwar years. All wrote books that were turned into movies; in fact, Beach’s novel about the Alaskan gold rush, The Spoilers, was filmed repeatedly, with much attention lavished upon its classic fistfight.

Zane Grey, a dentist from Zanesville, Ohio, was the premier writer of westerns. Bored with his practice, he began writing novels and produced over eighty books. He created such staples of western fiction as the legendary lone gunfighter and the moralistic “Code of the West” in such books as Lone Star Ranger and Riders of the Purple Sage.

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