AMERICAN LITERATURE

the body of written works produced in the English language in the United States. Like other national literatures, American literature was shaped by the history of the country that produced it. For almost a century and a half, America was merely a group of colonies scattered along the eastern seaboard of the North American continentcolonies from which a few hardy souls tentatively ventured westward. After a successful rebellion against the motherland, America became the United States, a nation. By the end of the 19th century this nation extended southward to the Gulf of Mexico, northward to the 49th parallel, and westward to the Pacific. By the end of the 19th century, too, it had taken its place among the powers of the worldits fortunes so interrelated with those of other nations that inevitably it became involved in two world wars and, following these conflicts, with the problems of Europe and East Asia. Meanwhile, the rise of science and industry, as well as changes in ways of thinking and feeling, wrought many modifications in people's lives. All these factors in the development of the United States molded the literature of the country. This article traces the history of American poetry, drama, fiction, and social and literary criticism from the early 17th century to the late 20th century. For information about closely related literary traditions, see English literature and Canadian literature: Canadian literature in English. the body of written works produced in the English language in the United States. The origins of American literature lie in the 17th century, in the earliest colonial days of America, but it was only after the American Revolution that writers created a characteristically American literature. As the country developed its own distinctive national character and institutions, a literary tradition that would reflect those unique characteristicssocial, economic, geographic, and linguisticbegan to evolve. Some themes derived from the vast size of the country, its diversity of people, and its frontier. The earliest American writings were based on European models and included not only fiction and poetry but also treatises on political and religious subjects. Of the poets, Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor wrote verse of high literary quality, and both were strongly influenced by English poets. The two leading literary figures of the middle part of the 18th century, both of whom wrote nonfiction on subjects of political importance, were Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine. Franklin began his career as a journalist, and his popular almanac series entitled Poor Richard's, with its epigrams displaying both wit and common sense, spoke meaningfully to the colonial society and examined the conflict between the colonies and Great Britain. Paine's pamphlet Common Sense (1776) continued to inspire Americans throughout the Revolutionary period. After the Revolution, the quest for a characteristic American literature began. Important writers of the early part of the 19th century included Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe. Cooper's Leatherstocking novels (182341) explored native American life, particularly that of the frontier; Irving was a satirist; while Poe was the first great American poet and one of the inventors of the horror and detective story genres. The first great period of American literature came between about 1830 and the beginning of the Civil War, when many writers were inspired by the mood of expansion and democracy that characterized the presidency of Andrew Jackson and the new spirit of hope and adventure that pervaded the country. They took as their subject the common man instead of the aristocratic figures found in English literature. The greatest of this group were the novelist Herman Melville, whose major work was the epic moral tale Moby Dick (1851); Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of such novels as The Scarlet Letter (1850); and the poet Walt Whitman, whose progressive and unconventional poetic autobiography was entitled Leaves of Grass (1855). Other writers of the period included the poet Emily Dickinson and a group known as the Transcendentalists, including the liberal philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson and the individualist Henry David Thoreau, whose well-known book Walden (1854) described his experience of learning self-reliance. Westward expansion during the 19th century resulted in the creation of much regional and humorous literature. The most important contributor to these genres was Mark Twain, whose The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) described life along the Mississippi River. Toward the end of the 19th century there emerged a group of writers known as naturalists, who saw man as a victim of his fate and treated everyday subjects unromantically and in unflinchingly realistic detail. Among the greatest of this group were Theodore Dreiser, whose novels Sister Carrie (1900) and The Financier (1912) explored new social problems in a rapidly industrializing America, and Stephen Crane, whose masterful account of Civil War combat was The Red Badge of Courage (1895). Other notable writers of naturalist fiction included Frank Norris and Jack London. Henry James's novels of the same period were quite different, dealing with the psychological processes of upper-middle-class characters and the social and moral conflicts arising between Europeans and Americans. James's enormous productivity, mastery of style, and psychological subtlety made him perhaps the greatest of all American novelists. After World War I an important group of novelists and poets, collectively known as the Lost Generation, reflecting their disillusionment with postwar society, won acclaim. The most important novelists of this interwar period included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, and Thomas Wolfe. Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) and other books show the disillusionment and moral decay of American society in the 1920s. Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) treat American expatriates in Europe during war or its aftermath. In such novels as The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), Faulkner offered a fictional rural Mississippi county as a microcosm of human society. The two most influential American poets of the first half of the 20th century, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, both lived abroad for much of their careers, where they exercised a decisive influence on modern Anglo-American verse. Other notable poets of the period included Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and e.e. cummings. Eugene O'Neill was the dominant figure in American drama during the interwar period, and one of the most important playwrights writing in any language during the century. His plays, among which are Long Day's Journey into Night (producd posthumously, 1956), generally display a tragic vision. After World War II a number of fiction writers came to prominence who, in the aftermath of World War II and the coming of atomic weapons and the Cold War, tended to reinterpret traditional American values. Norman Mailer, James Jones, Joseph Heller, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., all documented American participation in World War II and its accompanying horrors and absurdities. Fiction turned increasingly to fantasy and black humour in works by John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Thomas Pynchon. The novels of the Russian-born Vladimir Nabokov were celebrated for their use of irony, parody, and linguistic innovation. Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and the Yiddish-language writer Isaac Bashevis Singer tended to treat the human condition more optimistically, emphasizing humour and forgiveness. Such writers as John Updike, J.D. Salinger, and John Cheever tended to focus on the sexual and moral confusion of the middle class. Among the writers who carried on the Southern tradition in American letters were Robert Penn Warren, William Styron, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Carson McCullers. Black American writers in the 20th century, notably Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Alex Haley, and Toni Morrison, tended to explore themes of racism and race relations from a black point of view. American poets of the mid-20th century were pioneers of new techniques and styles of expression. Of these, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich were among the most prominent. In drama, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams emerged to prominence in the years after World War II with such works as Death of a Salesman (1949) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), respectively. They were followed by such playwrights as Edward Albee in the 1960s and Sam Shepard and David Mamet in the '70s and '80s. Additional reading Literary histories and major anthologies include RobertE. Spiller et al. (eds.), Literary History of theUnited States, 4th ed., rev., 2 vol. (1974), a standard generalwork; Marcus Cunliffe (ed.), American Literatureto 1900, new ed. (1986, reissued 1993), and American LiteratureSince 1900, new ed. (1987, reissued 1993); VernonLouis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: AnInterpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920, 3vol. (192730, reissued 1987), essential background reading; Walter Blair et al. (eds.), The Literatureof the United States, 3rd ed., 2 vol. (1966); Cleanth Brooks, R.W.B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren (compilers), American Literature: The Makers and the Making, 2 vol. (1973);and Alfred Kazin, An American Procession (1984),portraits of individual writers from Emerson to Fitzgerald. Since the1980s, anthologies have shifted to a multicultural viewpoint withbroad coverage of writing by women and minorities. The most controversial examplehas been Paul Lauter and Richard Yarborough (eds.), The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 2nd ed., 2 vol.(1994). Recent full-scale literary histories representing the workof younger scholars include Emory Elliott et al. (eds.), The Columbia Literary History of the United States (1991);and Sacvan Bercovitch and Cyrus R.K.Patell (eds.), The Cambridge History of American Literature (1994 ).Studies that focus on specific periods or trends of American literaryhistory include the following: on the colonial era and the periodof the early republic, Perry Miller, The NewEngland Mind: From Colony to Province (1953, reprinted 1983),and The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939,reissued 1983), two authoritative works; Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975), and TheAmerican Jeremiad (1978); Andrew Delbanco, ThePuritan Ordeal (1989); and Moses Coit Tyler, AHistory of American Literature, 2 vol. (1879, reprinted 1973),and The Literary History of the American Revolution, 1763-1783,2 vol. (1897, reprinted 1970); on the period of the American Revolution, closerto cultural history than criticism, Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (1976, reprinted1987); Peter Shaw, American Patriots and theRituals of Revolution (1981); Emory Elliott, RevolutionaryWriters (1982); and Jay Fliegelman, Prodigalsand Pilgrims (1982); on the post-Revolutionary era, RobertA. Ferguson, Law and Letters in American Culture (1984);and Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culturefrom Revolution Through Renaissance (1986); on the AmericanRenaissance, F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (1941,reprinted 1980), a classic study of the great writers of the 1850s;supplemented by studies of individual authors and of the popularwriting of the period, including Jane Tompkins, SensationalDesigns: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (1985),which discusses the sentimental novel; David S. Reynolds,Beneath the American Renaissance (1988), a comprehensive view ofthe popular culture of the day; and Michael T. Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace (1985), a studyof the material environment; and, on the period from the Civil Warto the 20th century, Jay Martin, Harvests of Change:American Literature, 1865-1914 (1964), a comprehensive study; Arthur Hobson Quinn, A History of the AmericanDrama, from the Beginning to the Civil War, 2nd ed. (1943, reprinted1979), and A History of the American Drama, from the Civil Warto the Present Day, rev. ed. (1964, reprinted 1980), the mostthorough treatment; Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds:An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (1942,reprinted 1982), a brilliantly written critical history; and MortonDauwen Zabel (ed.), Literary Opinion in America, 3rded., rev., 2 vol. (1962).Important studies of the pastoral and frontier traditions in Americanliterature are Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land:The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950, reissued 1978); R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence,Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1955, reissued 1984); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technologyand the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964, reprinted 1972); and,from a radically different viewpoint, Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the AmericanFrontier, 1600-1800 (1973), and The Fatal Environment: The Mythof the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (1985).Major work on the romance tradition in American fiction begins with D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923,reissued 1977); and is developed in Richard Chase, TheAmerican Novel and Its Tradition (1957, reprinted 1978); and Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the AmericanNovel, rev. ed. (1966, reissued 1992); as well as in later studiessuch as Joel Porte, The Romance in America: Studiesin Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James (1969); and Michael Davitt Bell, The Development of AmericanRomance (1980). The vast influence of Emerson on American culturehas been studied in Quentin Anderson, The Imperial Self (1971);and Irving Howe, The American Newness (1986).Recent work on American realism, stressing the social and historicalcontext, includes Eric J. Sundquist (ed.), American Realism:New Essays (1982); Philip Fisher, Hard Facts:Setting and Form in the American Novel (1985); and Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (1988). The roleof race in American literature is the ambitious subject of EricJ. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations (1993); while ethnicityis closely analyzed in Werner Sollors, BeyondEthnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (1986).The wide range of neglected novels by 19th-century women has beenmapped by Nina Baym, Woman's Fiction: A Guideto Novels By and About Women, 1820-70, 2nd ed. (1993); and Susan K. Harris, 19th-Century American Women's Novels (1990).Feminist criticism of American fiction can be found in JudithFetterley, The Resisting Reader (1978). Radical and ethnicwriting between the two world wars has been studied by WalterB. Rideout, The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954 (1956,reissued 1992); Daniel Aaron, Writers on theLeft (1961, reissued 1992); and Marcus Klein, Foreigners:The Making of American Literature, 1900-1940 (1981). The longhistory of African-American literature has been explored by RobertA. Bone, The Negro Novel in America, rev. ed. (1965); Robert B. Stepto, From Behind the Veil,2nd ed. (1991); and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., TheSignifying Monkey (1988). A succinct survey of Jewish-Americanwriting can be found in Allen Guttmann, The Jewish Writerin America (1971).Critical studies of post-World War II fiction include TonyTanner, City of Words (1971), valuable for understandingcontemporary metafiction; Morris Dickstein, Gatesof Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (1977, reprinted 1989),which places postwar writers in their cultural context; FrederickR. Karl, American Fictions, 1940-1980 (1983), a comprehensivestudy; and Daniel Hoffman (ed.), Harvard Guideto Contemporary American Writing (1979), a collection of essaysby major scholars. Studies of postwar poetry can be found in Charles Molesworth, The Fierce Embrace (1979); and Helen Vendler, Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets (1980).Studies of modern American drama include Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years (1945, reprinted 1983), dealing with the1930s; and C.W.E. Bigsby, A Critical Introductionto Twentieth-Century American Drama, 3 vol. (198285).Studies of 20th-century American critics can be found in Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (1980); and Morris Dickstein, Double Agent: The Critic and Society (1992). Walter Blair James R. Giles Morris Dickstein The 18th century In America in the early years of the 18th century, some writers, suchas Cotton Mather, carried on the older traditions.His huge history and biography of Puritan New England, MagnaliaChristi Americana, in 1702, and his vigorous Manuductio adMinisterium, or introduction to the ministry, in 1726, weredefenses of ancient Puritan convictions. Jonathan Edwards, initiator of the Great Awakening, areligious revival that stirred the eastern seacoast for many years,eloquently defended his burning belief in Calvinistic doctrineofthe concept that man, born totally depraved, could attain virtueand salvation only through God's gracein hispowerful sermons and most notably in the philosophical treatise Freedomof Will (1754). He supported his claims by relating them toa complex metaphysical system and by reasoning brilliantly in clearand often beautiful prose. But Mather and Edwards were defending a doomed cause. LiberalNew England ministers such as John Wise and Jonathan Mayhew movedtoward a less rigid religion. Samuel Sewall heraldedother changes in his amusing Diary, covering the years 16731729.Though sincerely religious, he showed in daily records how commerciallife in New England replaced rigid Puritanism with more worldlyattitudes. The Journal of Mme Sara Knightcomically detailed a journey that lady took to New York in 1704.She wrote vividly of what she saw and commented upon it from thestandpoint of an orthodox believer, but a quality of levity in herwitty writings showed that she was much less fervent than the Pilgrimfounders had been. In the South, William Byrdof Virginia, an aristocratic plantation owner, contrasted sharplywith gloomier predecessors. His record of a surveying trip in 1728, TheHistory of the Dividing Line, and his account of a visit tohis frontier properties in 1733, A Journey to the Land of Eden, werehis chief works. Years in England, on the Continent, and among thegentry of the South had created gaiety and grace of expression,and, although a devout Anglican, Byrd was as playful as the Restorationwits whose works he clearly admired. The wrench of the American Revolution emphasized differences thathad been growing between American and British political concepts. Asthe colonists moved to the belief that rebellion was inevitable,fought the bitter war, and worked to found the new nation'sgovernment, they were influenced by a number of very effective politicalwriters, such as Samuel Adams and John Dickinson, both of whom favouredthe colonists, and Loyalist Joseph Galloway. But two figures loomedabove theseBenjamin Franklin andThomas Paine. Franklin, born in 1706, had started to publish his writings inhis brother's newspaper, the New England Courant, asearly as 1722. This newspaper championed the cause of the LeatherApron man and the farmer and appealed by using easily understoodlanguage and practical arguments. The idea that common sense wasa good guide was clear in both the popular PoorRichard's almanac, which Franklin edited between 1732 and 1757and filled with prudent and witty aphorisms purportedly writtenby uneducated but experienced Richard Saunders, and in the author's Autobiography, written between 1771 and 1788, a record ofhis rise from humble circumstances that offered worldly wise suggestionsfor future success. Franklin's self-attained culture, deep and wide, gavesubstance and skill to varied articles, pamphlets, and reports thathe wrote concerning the dispute with Great Britain, many of themextremely effective in stating and shaping the colonists' cause. Thomas Paine went from his native Englandto Philadelphia and became a magazine editor and then, about 14 monthslater, the most effective propagandist for the colonial cause. His pamphlet Common Sense (January1776) did much to influence the colonists to declare their independence. The American Crisis papers(December 1776December 1783) spurred Americans to fighton through the blackest years of the war. Based upon Paine'ssimple deistic beliefs, they showed the conflict as a stirring melodramawith the angelic colonists against the forces of evil. Such whiteand black picturings were highly effective propaganda. Another reasonfor Paine's success was his poetic fervour, which foundexpression in impassioned words and phrases long to be rememberedand quoted. The new nation In the postwar period some of these eloquent men were no longerable to win a hearing. Thomas Paine and Samuel Adams lacked the constructiveideas that appealed to those interested in forming a new government.Others fared betterfor example, Franklin, whose tolerance andsense showed in addresses to the constitutional convention. A different groupof authors, however, became leaders in the new periodThomas Jeffersonand the talented writers of The Federalist papers,a series of 85 essays published in 1787 and 1788 urging the virtuesof the proposed new constitution. They were written by AlexanderHamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. More distinguished for insightinto problems of government and cool logic than for eloquence, theseworks became a classic statement of American governmental, and moregenerally of republican, theory. At the time they were highly effectivein influencing legislators who voted on the new constitution. Hamilton,who wrote perhaps 51 of the Federalist papers, became a leaderof the Federalist Party and, as first secretary of the treasury(178995), wrote messages that were influential in increasingthe power of national government at the expense of the state governments. Thomas Jefferson was an influential politicalwriter during and after the war. The merits of his great summary, the Declaration of Independence, consisted,as Madison pointed out, in a lucid communication of humanrights . . . in a style and tone appropriate to the great occasion,and to the spirit of the American people. After the warhe formulated the exact tenets of his faith in various papers butmost richly in his letters and inaugural addresses, in which heurged individual freedom and local autonomya theory of decentralizationdiffering from Hamilton's belief in strong federal government.Though he held that all men are created equal, Jefferson thoughtthat a natural aristocracy of virtuesand talents should hold high governmental positions. The 19th century Early 19th-century literature After the American Revolution, and increasingly after the War of 1812, American writers were exhorted to produce a literature that was truly native. As if in response, four authors of very respectable stature appeared. William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe initiated a great half century of literary development. Bryant, a New Englander by birth, attracted attention in his 23rd year when the first version of his poem Thanatopsis (1817) appeared. This, as well as some later poems, was written under the influence of English 18th-century poets. Still later, however, under the influence of Wordsworth and other Romantics, he wrote nature lyrics that vividly represented the New England scene. Turning to journalism, he had a long career as a fighting liberal editor of The Evening Post. He himself was overshadowed, in renown at least, by a native-born New Yorker, Washington Irving. Irving, youngest member of a prosperous merchant family, joined with ebullient young men of the town in producing the Salmagundi papers (180708), which took off the foibles of Manhattan's citizenry. This was followed by A History of New York (1809), by Diedrich Knickerbocker, a burlesque history that mocked pedantic scholarship and sniped at the old Dutch families. Irving's models in these works were obviously Neoclassical English satirists, from whom he had learned to write in a polished, bright style. Later, having met Sir Walter Scott and having become acquainted with imaginative German literature, he introduced a new Romantic note in The Sketch Book (181920), Bracebridge Hall (1822), and other works. He was the first American writer to win the ungrudging (if somewhat surprised) respect of British critics. James Fenimore Cooper won even wider fame. Following the pattern of Sir Walter Scott's Waverley novels, he did his best work in the Leatherstocking tales (182341), a five-volume series celebrating the career of a great frontiersman named Natty Bumppo. His skill in weaving history into inventive plots and in characterizing his compatriots brought him acclaim not only in America and England but on the continent of Europe as well. Edgar Allan Poe, reared in the South, lived and worked as an author and editor in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Richmond, and New York City. His work was shaped largely by analytical skill that showed clearly in his role as an editor: time after time he gauged the taste of readers so accurately that circulation figures of magazines under his direction soared impressively. It showed itself in his critical essays, wherein he lucidly explained and logically applied his criteria. His gothic tales of terror were written in accordance with his findings when he studied the most popular magazines of the day. His masterpieces of terrorThe Fall of the House of Usher (1839), The Masque of the Red Death (1842), The Cask of Amontillado (1846), and otherswere written according to a carefully worked out psychological method. So were his detective stories, such as The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), which historians credited as the first of the genre. As a poet, he achieved fame with The Raven (1845). His work, especially his critical writings and carefully crafted poems, had perhaps a greater influence in France, where they were translated by Charles Baudelaire, than in his own country. Two Southern novelists were also outstanding in the earlier part of the century: John Pendleton Kennedy and William Gilmore Simms. In Swallow Barn (1832), Kennedy wrote delightfully of life on the plantations. Simms's forte was the writing of historical novels like those of Scott and Cooper, which treated the history of the frontier and his native South Carolina. The Yemassee (1835) and Revolutionary romances show him at his best. American Renaissance The authors who began to come to prominence in the 1830s and were active until about the end of the Civil Warthe humorists, the classic New Englanders, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and othersdid their work in a new spirit, and their achievements were of a new sort. In part, this was because they were in some way influenced by the broadening democratic concepts that in 1829 triumphed in Andrew Jackson's inauguration as president. In part, it was because, in this Romantic period of emphasis upon native scenes and characters in many literatures, they put much of America into their books. Particularly full of vivid touches were the writings of two groups of American humorists whose works appeared between 1830 and 1867. One group created several down-east Yankee characters who used commonsense arguments to comment upon the political and social scene. The most important of this group were Seba Smith, James Russell Lowell, and Benjamin P. Shillaber. These authors caught the talk and character of New England at that time as no one else had done. In the old Southwest, meanwhile, such writers as Davy Crockett, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson J. Hooper, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, Joseph G. Baldwin, and George Washington Harris drew lively pictures of the ebullient frontier and showed the interest in the common man that was a part of Jacksonian democracy. The 20th century Writing from 1914 to 1945 Important movements in drama, poetry, fiction, and criticism took form in the years before, during, and after World War I. The eventful period that followed the war left its imprint upon books of all kinds. Literary forms of the period were extraordinarily varied, and in drama, poetry, and fiction leading authors tended toward radical technical experiments. Experiments in drama Although drama had not been a major art form in the 19th century, no type of writing was more experimental than a new drama that arose in rebellion against the glib commercial stage. In the early years of the 20th century, Americans traveling in Europe encountered a vital, flourishing theatre; returning home, some of them became active in founding the Little Theatre movement throughout the country. Freed from commercial limitations, playwrights experimented with dramatic forms and methods of production, and in time producers, actors, and dramatists appeared who had been trained in college classrooms and community playhouses. Some Little Theatre groups became commercial producersfor example, the Washington Square Players, founded in 1915, which became the Theatre Guild (first production in 1919). The resulting drama was marked by a spirit of innovation and by a new seriousness and maturity. Eugene O'Neill, the most admired dramatist of the period, was a product of this movement. He worked with the Provincetown Players before his plays were commercially produced. His dramas were remarkable for their range. Beyond the Horizon (first performed 1920), Anna Christie (1921), Desire Under the Elms (1924), and The Iceman Cometh (1946) were naturalistic works, while The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1922) made use of the Expressionistic techniques developed in German drama in the period 191424. He also employed a stream-of-consciousness form in Strange Interlude (1928) and produced a work that combined myth, family drama, and psychological analysis in Mourning Becomes Electra (1931). No other dramatist was as generally praised as O'Neill, but many others wrote plays that reflected the growth of a serious and varied drama, including Maxwell Anderson, whose verse dramas have dated badly, and Robert E. Sherwood, a Broadway professional who wrote both comedy (Reunion in Vienna ) and tragedy (There Shall Be No Night ). Marc Connelly wrote touching fantasy in a Negro folk biblical play, The Green Pastures (1930). Like O'Neill, Elmer Rice made use of both Expressionistic techniques (The Adding Machine ) and naturalism (Street Scene ). Lillian Hellman wrote powerful, well-crafted melodramas in The Children's Hour (1934) and The Little Foxes (1939). Radical theatre experiments included Marc Blitzstein's savagely satiric musical The Cradle Will Rock (1937) and the work of Orson Welles and John Houseman for the government-sponsored Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Theatre Project. The premier radical theatre of the decade was the Group Theatre (193141) under Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg, which became best known for presenting the work of Clifford Odets. In Waiting for Lefty (1935), a stirring plea for labour unionism, Odets roused the audience to an intense pitch of fervour, and in Awake and Sing (1935), perhaps the best play of the decade, he created a lyrical work of family conflict and youthful yearning. Other important plays by Odets for the Group Theatre were Paradise Lost (1935), Golden Boy (1937), and Rocket to the Moon (1938). Thornton Wilder used stylized settings and poetic dialogue in Our Town (1938) and turned to fantasy in The Skin of Our Teeth (1942). William Saroyan shifted his lighthearted, anarchic vision from fiction to drama with My Heart's in the Highlands and The Time of Your Life (both 1939).