Writers for the Nation

The years between World War I and World War II are commonly seen as the period when international modernism took hold in American art. C. Barry Chabot, however, argues against the assumption that American modernist writers were preoccupied by artistic innovation and thus indifferent to the nation's social and political life. Chabot shows that American literary modernists participated actively in a broad conversation about ways to restore or create feelings of belonging among their contemporaries who thought that life was becoming increasingly abrasive and that the United State no longer afforded its citizens a viable sense of community. Although each writer identified this loss of community, each described it in somewhat different terms, ascribed to it different causes, and proposed different ways to redress it. Writers for the Nation represents the cultural debate that American literary modernism staged about how this national problem could best be resolved. Through careful readings of a select few authors - including Willa Cather, T. S. Eliot, Allen Tate, Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Stevens - Chabot demonstrates how these writers understood the social situation, how they proposed to correct it, and how each proposed remedy contained its own limitations. He presents affinities among writers usually assumed to have little in common, writers who all produced powerful variants of American literary modernism.