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Who is the most important writer of the early 20th century?


John Simkin

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  • 5 months later...

My list of contemporary writers,

D.H Lawrence

Toni Morrison

H.G. Wells

Carson McCullers

Vladimir Nabokov

Tenessee Williams

John Steinbeck

William Faulkner

Alice Walker

George Orwell

Aldous Huxley

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  • 2 years later...

In summer 1932 Aldous Huxley published Brave New World. It was an international best-seller and established him as Britain's best-known novelist between the wars. Translated into twenty-eight languages, the novel was inspired by Men Like Gods, a utopian novel by H. G. Wells. However, George Orwell argued that the novel "must be partly derived from" We by the Russian writer, Yevgeny Zamyatin. Huxley denied that he had ever heard of this book.

David King Dunaway has pointed out: "The novel, the first about human cloning, is a dystopia set five centuries in the future, when overpopulation has led to biogenetic engineering. Through computerized genetic selection, social engineers create a population happy with its lot. All the earth's children are born in hatcheries, and Soma, a get-happy pill, irons out most problems."

Time Magazine saw it as an attack on the culture of the United States with Henry Ford as the new God (worshippers say "Our Ford" instead of "Our Lord"): "Huxley's 1932 work - about a drugged, dull and mass-produced society of the future - has been challenged for its themes of sexuality, drugs and suicide. The book parodies H.G. Wells' utopian novel Men Like Gods and expresses Huxley's disdain for the youth and market-driven culture of the U.S. Chewing gum, then as now a symbol of America's teenybopper shoppers, appears in the book as a way to deliver sex hormones and subdue anxious adults; pornographic films called feelies are also popular grown-up pacifiers."

Beatrice Webb was also highly critical of the book: "I have been reading Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point, and pondering over this strangely pathological writing, pathological without knowing it. The febrile futility of the particular clique he describes reminds me of that far more powerful book The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann. Far more powerful because Mann is describing a society of sick people ... Huxley's group do not know that they are sick and are presented as a sample of normal human life. What with their continuous and promiscuous copulations, their shallow talk and chronic idleness, the impression left is one of simple disgust at their bodies and minds.... And the book, apart from arousing a morbid interest in morbidity, is dull, dull, dull. In a few years' time it will be unreadable - it represents a fashion. In this characteristic of fashionableness Aldous Huxley is like his maternal aunt, Mrs Humphry Ward; also in his tendency to preach."

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jhuxley.htm

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  • 6 months later...

I think that Ernest Hemingway was, by far, the most influential author of the early 20th century from a writing style standpoint.

He competed with Thomas Wolfe (another Charles Scribner writer, I believe, and also a Harvard alumnus), William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Reading about the American ex-pats in Paris in the 1920s is quite intersting.

His experiences there are nicely chronicled in his posthumously published "A Moveable Feast".

I think that the most influential playwrite would have invariably been Tennessee Williams.

Hemingway is my favorite author and Williams is my favorite playwrite.

I have seen both of their homes in Key West.

The 1950s and 1960s were also intersting American literary times with the contributions of the Beat Generation artists.

I am reading Charles Bukowski's "Ham on Rye" right now.

I don't know whether he is technically a Beat Generation artist.

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I think that Ernest Hemingway was, by far, the most influential author of the early 20th century from a writing style standpoint.

He competed with Thomas Wolfe (another Charles Scribner writer, I believe, and also a Harvard alumnus), William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Reading about the American ex-pats in Paris in the 1920s is quite intersting.

His experiences there are nicely chronicled in his posthumously published "A Moveable Feast".

I think that the most influential playwrite would have invariably been Tennessee Williams.

Hemingway is my favorite author and Williams is my favorite playwrite.

I have seen both of their homes in Key West.

The 1950s and 1960s were also intersting American literary times with the contributions of the Beat Generation artists.

I am reading Charles Bukowski's "Ham on Rye" right now.

I don't know whether he is technically a Beat Generation artist.

Bukowski might be considered a beat. Hemingway was most certainly pre-Beat Gen era, and his Moveable Feast of the 20s is of the Lost Generation, but not totally unrelated to the JFK assassination, as Oswald mentions Hemingway in Paris in his letter to John Connally,

asking for assistance in returning from USSR to USA. Oswald tells Connally that his situation was presented by reporters

as another "turncoat" when actually he went to Russia like Hemingway went to Paris.

While Priscilla Johnson, one of the reporters Oswald blames for misrepresenting his situation, concluded he was invoking

Oswald's stay in Paris in the 20s, Hemingway returned to Paris in 1944 when he helped liberate the city from the Nazis.

After leaving his Key West and Havana haunts where he worked for the ONI in hunting Nazi U-boats, Hemingway

returned to Europe after the D-Day invasion and attached himself to a motley band of French resistance fighters. Joined by

his friend OSS Col. David Bruce, Hemingway and his band liberated the Ritz Hotel, where the martini was said to have been

invented. Arriving a few hours after the German general staff had left, Hemingway is said to have put his gun on the bar,

counted heads and ordered 40 dry martinis.

David Bruce went on to become Hemingway's best man at his wedding and JFK's Ambassador to the Court of St. James,

where he was briefed directly the head of NPIC on the Soviet missiles in Cuba during the missile crisis.

So when Oswald wrote his letter to former Navy Sec John Connally, who he is later accused of shooting, was he referring

to the literary Hemingway in Paris in the 20s or the covert special ops OSS reporter who liberated Paris with David Bruce?

For photo of David Bruce and Hemingway shortly before they liberated Paris:

JFKCountercoup2

Edited by William Kelly
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