jan 1, 1910 - modernism starts taking hold

Description:

definiton: A literary and artistic movement that questioned the ideals of progress and order, rejected realism, and emphasized new cultural forms. Modernism had great cultural influence in the twentieth century and remains influential today.
Some authors believed realism did not go far enough to overturn sentimentalism. Jack London spent his teenage years as a factory worker, sailor, and tramp. In stories such as “The Law of Life” (1901), he echoed the ideas of Social Darwinism, dramatizing what he saw as the harsh reality of an uncaring universe. American society, he said, was “a jungle wherein wild beasts eat and are eaten.” Similarly, Stephen Crane tried to capture “a world full of fists.” London and Crane suggested that human beings were not so much rational shapers of their own destinies as blind victims of forces beyond their control — including their own subconscious impulses.

America’s most famous writer, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who took the pen name of Mark Twain, came to an equally bleak view. Though he achieved enormous success with such lighthearted books as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Clemens courted controversy with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), notable for its indictment of slavery and racism. In his novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), which ends with a bloody, technology-driven slaughter of Arthur’s knights, Mark Twain became one of the bitterest critics of America’s idea of progress. An outspoken critic of imperialism and foreign missions, Twain eventually denounced Christianity itself as a hypocritical delusion. Like his friend the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, Clemens “got rid of theology.”

By the time Clemens died in 1910, American writers and artists had laid the groundwork for modernism, which rejected traditional canons of artistic taste. Questioning the whole idea of progress and order, modernists focused on the subconscious and “primitive” mind. Above all, they sought to overturn convention and tradition. Poet Ezra Pound exhorted, “Make it new!” Modernism became the first great literary and artistic movement of the twentieth century.

Added to timeline:

Date: