The wars of the 20th century and the rise of the United States as a global power constitute the second part of the special feature The History of the United States Through Its Great Novels, commemorating the 250th anniversary of independence. This second installment explores the period in which the country transitioned from an emerging power to the dominant power of the 20th century, while the American Dream took hold and its first cracks began to appear.

It ranges from World War I to the Vietnam War, encompassing the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression following the 1929 stock market crash, and the Cold War, as reflected in the following novels:

• A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway (1929): the experience of World War I.
• The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925): the Roaring Twenties and the American Dream.
• The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck (1939): the Great Depression.
• Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut (1969): the trauma of World War II.
• Underworld, by Don DeLillo (1997): the impact of the Cold War.
• The Armies of the Night, by Norman Mailer (1968): Vietnam and protest.

The twenty-one novels in this collection follow the historical order of the events they narrate, not the order of their publication. In this way, they form a timeline that allows us to explore the history of the United States from a literary perspective and observe, in a cross-section, the major conflicts that have shaped the country from its origins to the present day.

The first part of our journey through the history of the United States covers the period from colonization to the westward expansion, including slavery and the Civil War. The works reviewed are (You can see the first installment HERE):

The Making of a Nation

• The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850): Puritanism and the moral origins of the United States.
• The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper (1826): the frontier and the conflict with Indigenous peoples.
• Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner (1936): violence, slavery, and the decline of the South.
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (1884-85): freedom, racism, and identity.
• Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy (1985): the conquest of the West, the massacre of Native Americans, and the foundational violence.
• Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell (1936): the Civil War and the end of the Old South.
• Beloved, by Toni Morrison (1987): the memory of slavery and its wounds.
• The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton (1920): high society, the violence of hypocrisy, and urban modernization.
• My Ántonia, by Willa Cather (1918): European immigration and the conquest of the Great Plains.

This is not to claim that the history of the United States is solely a history of violence, but rather to observe that many of its great novels have found, precisely in these conflicts, the best material to explain how the country has been built: from the denial of its multicultural origins and racial discrimination to slavery, successive waves of immigration, and the gap between the democratic ideal and historical reality.

Read consecutively, they compose an alternative history: not that of presidents or wars, but that of the moral, social, and cultural conflicts that their writers considered crucial to understanding the country.

World War I: 1915-1918

A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway (1929)

Hemingway’s third novel, one of his most important, is autobiographical and served as a vehicle for an anti-war narrative, raw yet hopeful. The writer participated in the Great War on the Italian front as an ambulance driver, was wounded in the legs, and met a nurse with whom he fell in love. He transfigured all these experiences into the character of Lieutenant Frederic Henry: war, fear, violence, love, guilt. The senselessness of a confrontation.

Excerpt:

“The troops marched past the house, moving away down the road, and the dust they kicked up covered the leaves of the trees. The trunks were dusty too; the leaves had fallen early that year, and we watched the troops march past, the dust they raised and the leaves that fell, stirred by the breeze as the soldiers marched by, and then the road white and empty except for the leaves”.

***

The 1920s

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

This novel is much more than what it is usually identified with: a period piece depicting the famous Roaring Twenties, idealism, the American Dream and what can happen with its excesses, love and existentialism in the aftermath of the First World War, written with exquisite skill. What Fitzgerald creates is a link between the abruptly withdrawn past and the aspirational future that soon collapsed with the Great Depression of 1929.

Excerpt:

“If so, he must have felt as though he had lost his old, warm world, as though he had paid a heavy price for living too long with only one dream. He must have gazed at the unfamiliar sky through intimidating foliage, felt a shiver as he discovered how grotesque a rose could be and how harshly the sun beat down on the newly grown grass. A new world, not quite real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams as one breathes air, drifted aimlessly… like that fantastic ashen figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees”.

***

The Great Depression: 1929 and the 1930s

The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck (1939)

The 1929 stock market crash, the great economic crisis that gripped the United States, not only ruined the wealthy but also devastated the lives of millions of citizens, particularly rural people, revealing the dark and ruthless face of capitalism. Steinbeck focuses on the effects on farmers and agricultural workers who lost their land and their homes, including their rental properties. Many were forced to migrate to regions like California. The author portrays this economic, social, egalitarian, and humanitarian breakdown through the Joad family. He recounts the hardships and indignities faced by this group of people. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940.

Excerpt:

“Then came June, and the sun shone even more cruelly. The brown edges of the corn leaves broadened and reached the central husk. The weeds withered and shrank, turning back to their roots. The air was thin and the sky paler; and the earth grew paler day by day. On the roads where animal packs moved, where wheels churned the earth and horses’ hooves churned it, the crust broke and turned to dust”.

***

World War II: 1944–1945

Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

The United States entered World War II on December 8, 1941, the day after Japan attacked its military base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, on the Pacific Ocean. Its participation was decisive in the defeat of Adolf Hitler and Nazism in 1945. The country did not experience the conflict on its soil, except for the attack on Pearl Harbor, but millions of its citizens suffered on the battlefields of Europe and North Africa. And it consolidated its position as the great power of the 20th century. Vonnegut focuses his novel on a fictional soldier named Billy Pilgrim during the end of the war. The moment is the deadly Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945, which the writer himself witnessed because he was there. To do so, he resorts to satire, beginning with the fact that the soldier is captured by the Germans and imprisoned in a slaughterhouse. A raw and realistic anti-war novel with a touch of science fiction, as Pilgrim encounters the Tralfamadorians, who perceive four dimensions and consider humankind a curious creature.

Excerpt:

“As a trafficker of climactic moments, emotions, characterizations, marvelous dialogue, intrigues, and confrontations, I had sketched out the Dresden story many times. The best sketch I ever made, or at least the most beautiful, was on the back of a roll of wallpaper”.

***

Cold War: 1951–mid-nineties

Underworld, by Don DeLillo (1997)

“It appears that the Soviet Union has conducted an atomic test at a secret site within its own borders”, writes Don DeLillo in this novel that captures the tension the world experienced after World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The United States consolidates its power and strengthens its so-called “American Dream”. That nuclear test took place on October 3, 1951, an event that serves as a platform to narrate half a century of American history and “a unique vision of the soul of modern society: its fears and obsessions, its hopes and desires, its achievements and frustrations. From the grand ballrooms of New York to the bombings of Vietnam and the Cold War, figures who defined an era mingle with anonymous individuals and together illuminate the secrets of our time”. Don DeLillo masterfully uses the story of a baseball and the lives of several characters as a narrative thread, weaving together a series of interconnected stories.

Excerpt:

“It appears that the Soviet Union has conducted an atomic test at a secret site within its own borders. In plain terms, they have detonated a bomb. And our detection systems clearly indicate that this is what it is: a bomb, a weapon, an instrument of conflict that produces heat, deflagration, and a shock wave. This is not a peaceful use of atomic energy for domestic heating systems. This is a full-fledged bomb that produces an enormous white cloud, like a Eurasian thunder deity”.

***

Vietnam War (1955-1975)

The Armies of the Night, by Norman Mailer (1968)

One of the traumas of the United States is the Vietnam War (1955-1975) due to its failed resolution, the thousands of deaths, and the political devastation. Norman Mailer encapsulates this entire period—physical, emotional, spiritual, political, and existential—in a key event: the march on the Pentagon on October 21, 1967. The entire country was represented there: “groups from the old and new left, hippies, yuppies, weathermen, Quakers, Christians, feminists, and the most varied urban tribes.” Mailer was there; he was, he saw, he felt, he participated, and he personally suffered the repression. This is a chronicle of victims, heroes, demons, ghosts, illusions, promises, disappointments, contradictions, injustices, and all the cracks and farces of a country that tries to sell a different story, but Mailer gives voice to History. This non-fiction novel reveals the psyche of the United States through the voice of one of its sons. He won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1969.

Excerpt:

“But Mailer’s mind was not without a certain complexity. Just as the next generation would blast their brains with amphetamines, he had given his head the texture of a good Gruyère cheese. Years earlier, he had subjected his intellectual firmament to all kinds of erosion by consuming moderately promiscuous doses of whiskey, marijuana, Seconal, and Benzedrine. This had given him the illusion of being a genius, just as a decade later a whole generation of children would see themselves in their heavenly LSD trips.

However, now that he once again had a functioning brain, only partially affected by old escapades with drugs (whose ravages were noticeable in occasional lapses, such as the inability to find the absolutely essential word at a given moment, or the realization that a certain crucial milestone in memory had been erased forever, so that, even if it were up to him to recall it, he would be able to recall it). Life in it, he couldn’t remember if a certain loved one from the past had come to his aid or betrayed him on some particular occasion—a not insignificant gap for a novelist!—Mailer was an enemy of drugs”.

This special reminds us that the arts, and literature in particular, are windows that allow us to see what people, society, the political system, ideas, dreams, and even the influence of their own past, their idea of ​​the future, and the relationship of human beings with nature were like. Novels, short stories, and poetry collections are portraits of eras that help us better understand the present.

SPECIAL

Part One: The History of the United States Through Its Great Novels (1): From the Colonial Era to the Building of a Nation

Part Two: The History of the United States Through Its Great Novels (2): The Building of the American Century

Part Three: The History of the United States Through Its Great Novels (3): The Fractures of the American Dream and the Uncertainty of the 21st Century.

• With translation assistance from Robert Lienhard.

All articles from our English edition are available HERE

***

Subscribe to WMagazín’s free newsletter at this link.

We invite you to become a patron of WMagazín and support quality, independent cultural journalism. It’s easy; you can find the instructions at this link.

If you’d like to learn more about WMagazín and its special sections, CLICK HERE.

• @WinstonManrique
• @W_Magazín
• YouTube
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Tiktok