Modernism and Literature: An Introduction and Reader

Culture and Aesthetics

Charles Baudelaire (1821-67)

Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris, France in 1821.  In 1841, his parents sent him to India to shield him from the bohemian influences of Paris, but Baudelaire escaped and returned to the city where he became an exuberant dandy and flâneur, art critic, translator of Edgar Allen Poe, barricade fighter during the 1848 revolution, frequenter of cafes and brothels, and writer.  Baudelaire’s best-known collection of poems, Les fleurs du mal (1857), captures his sensational experiences in Paris. His aesthetic was rooted in all of the decadent, exotic, sensual, dark, and erotic experiences that Paris could offer; his poetry and art criticism influenced his descendants, the modern Symbolist poets Stephane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine.    

Louise Bogan (1897–1970)

Louise Bogan was born in Livermore Falls, Maine in 1897, and her family’s misfortunes led to her and her brother’s itinerant life in her home state and across New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The daughter of a millworker and an unstable and frequently disappearing mother, she attended Boston’s prestigious Girls’ Latin High School, with a patron’s assistance; there, her interest in poetry flourished. Deeply attached to poetic tradition and form, Bogan combined the intellectual ruminations of the metaphysical poets with metered and lyrical verse forms. An insistently individual poet, Bogan eschewed the fashionable Modernist free-verse style and insisted upon full immersion in poetics and not politics. Bogan’s best-known works include Body of Death: Poems (1923), The Blue Estuaries, Poems, 1923–1959, and her critical study, Achievement in American Poetry, 1900–1950 (1951).  

Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)

Born in Ireland in 1899, Elizabeth Bowen was the only daughter of a well-established Anglo-Irish family and the heir to her ancestral home, Bowen’s Court in County Cork, Ireland. In her youth she moved to England where she became a writer. Her novel The Last September (1929) keenly observes the cataclysmic changes that racked Ireland and England in the twentieth century. Her works bear particular witness to the experience of women, adolescents, and children, and, despite the lingering presence of the Irish War of Independence, World War I, and World War II in her works, the plots that she explores are definitively domestic. 

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)

Born in Augsburg, Bavaria in 1898, Bertolt Brecht grew up in Germany and attended Munich University. From a young age, Brecht was a Marxist and anti-materialist: he was threatened with expulsion from grammar school for his caustically unenthusiastic response to a patriotic essay exercise. As a playwright, theatre director, poet, and fiction writer, Brecht aimed to agitate his audience and transform culture. Brecht’s most famous plays, which are explicitly anti-Nazi and anti-fascistic, include Fear and Misery of the Third Reich (1938), Mother Courage and Her Children (1941), Galileo (1943), and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1945). Brecht’s collaborations with the composer Kurt Weill, The Threepenny Opera (1928) and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahoganny (1930), helped to revive serious musical theatre. Some of the German playwright’s most famous theoretical essays include “The Modern Theatre is Epic Theatre” (1930), “The Street Scene: A Basic Model for Epic Theatre” (1938-40), and “On Experimental Theatre” (1939, 1961).

Isadora Duncan (1877–1927)

Isadora Duncan was born in San Francisco, California in 1877. She danced as a child in America, rejecting various schools and approaches before moving to Europe in 1898 to pursue a performance career. Duncan spent the rest of her life in Europe, where she founded dance schools in Germany, France, and post-revolutionary Russia that revolutionized dance and gender paradigms, training students to embody the free spirit of the new woman through emphasizing natural, relatively unconstricted movement. Upending the traditions of classical ballet, Duncan created a new style of modern dance that aimed to represent the universal laws of nature as well as the individuality of the dancer. In 1927, she died in a tragic car accident when her scarf became caught in the vehicle.  

Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948)

Sergei Eisenstein was born in Latvia in 1898 and studied architecture at the Petrograd Institute of Civil Engineering. Eisenstein joined the Red Army in 1918 to support the communist uprising in Russia. In the 1920s, he served as assistant stage director and, eventually, co-director of Moscow’s Theatre of the People (Proletkult Theatre), which embraced folk and popular “low” cultural expressions. Eisenstein’s best-known films, Strike (1924), The Battleship Potemkin (1925), and October: Ten Days that Shook the World (1927), aestheticized agitation with the goal of communally awakening the audience. His passions for Renaissance art, philosophy, avant-garde theatre and cinema, expressionism, Japanese visual and performing arts, and Marxist and formalist theories informed his filmmaking. He was eventually spurned by the Soviet Union’s Communist Party and the Hollywood film industry for his works’ theoretical formalism.

Langston Hughes (1902–67)

Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri in 1902. He began writing poetry in elementary school and published his first “jazz poem” while in high school. Hughes attended Columbia University for a year in 1920 and completed his education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. His poetry was published in Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro (1925), and he subsequently published his own poetry collections, most notably The Weary Blues (1926), Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), and Scottsboro Limited: Five Poems and a Play (1932). Hughes’s accessible, direct and rhythmic poems unashamedly celebrated everyday experiences – the hardships and delights – of workers, neighbors, recognizable and familiar regular folk.

William James (1842–1910)

William James was born in New York in 1842 into a prominent New England family. His father, Henry James, Sr., was a well-known theologian, his younger brother was the novelist Henry James, and his sister Alice James was also a writer (celebrated for her posthumously published diaries). Educated at Harvard University, William James became a pioneer in the field of psychology and an advocate of pragmatism in philosophy. His published works include The Principles of Psychology (1890), which contains his famous analogy of the human mind to a “river or … stream of thought,” and Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912).

Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)  

Born in Canada in 1882 and raised in England, Lewis was educated at the Slade School of Art at University College, London and became a writer and painter. Lewis achieved fame as the founder of Vorticism, a visual arts movement so-labelled by Ezra Pound, which blended together Cubist form and Futurist ideology. He edited the little magazine Blast, which was the voice of Vorticism, during its existence from 1914–1915. Lewis was and is a polarizing figure for his outspoken, flamboyant antagonism to literary, artistic, and political establishments and for the right-wing political views that led him to write a book supporting Hitler (later recanted).  

Walter Pater (1839–94) 

Walter Pater was born in 1839 in London and attended Queen’s College at Oxford, where he later became a tutor and scholar. Pater is considered the forefather of the aesthetic movement in England. His famously regarded work, The Renaissance, is a study of the major paintings of the period which espouses a view of “art for its own sake” and became a cornerstone of aestheticism. After the publication of The Renaissance, Pater became closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement in the arts and published a novel titled Marius the Epicurean (1885), in which the titular hero attempts to lead an aesthetic life.

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)

Gertrude Stein was born in Pennsylvania and attended Harvard University’s school for women (now Radcliffe College) where she studied psychology under William James. In 1902, she and her brother Leo moved to Paris, and Stein lived most of her life as an expatriate in France. She collected the extraordinary art of many of her contemporaries who were on the verge of great acclaim: Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, among others. Stein also wrote fiction, and her major work includes Three Lives (1909; independent stories of three women set in the same fictional town); Tender Buttons (1914; poetry); The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress (1925; modernist novel focused on a single family); and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933; a novel thinly disguised as a memoir). Stein’s writings were among the most experimental of the Modernists and embraced an extreme version of stream of consciousness. Despite her radical use of language, Stein was a political conservative who opposed Roosevelt and the New Deal and supported Hitler (at least during his early years in power).

Arthur Symons (1865–1945)

Arthur Symons was born in Wales in 1865. He was educated privately while traveling in France and Italy in his youth and went on to become an influential critic and poet. He contributed work to the The Yellow Book, an important publication in the development of the Aesthetic movement, and published many essays about literature. Symons was close friends with W.B. Yeats and even introduced the poet to the Symbolist movement. Symons’ description of the French Symbolist movement was influential in shaping English and American Modernism.  

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

Oscar Wilde was born in 1854 and raised in Ireland, where he attended Trinity College, Dublin, before moving on to Oxford University in England. While at Oxford, two of his tutors were John Ruskin and Walter Pater who greatly influenced his approach to art. He achieved fame with his plays An Ideal Husband (1894) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), demonstrating the Edwardian ideal in drama. His most famous novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray celebrates youth and beauty. His aesthetic ideals were later held against him in his notorious trials for “acts of gross obscenity,” for which he was imprisoned. He was persecuted for homosexual acts, and even sued his lover’s father, the Marquess of Queensbury, for libel following his condemnation of Wilde as a “posing somdomite [sic].”

Philosophy and Religion

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)

Walter Benjamin was born in Berlin in 1892 and spent much of his childhood in Germany. He earned his doctorate at the University of Bern in Switzerland before moving back to Germany. A German-Jewish literary critic, translator, freelance journalist and cultural critic, Benjamin is renowned for his idiosyncratic scholarship and his affiliations with the intellectuals associated with the Frankfurt School for Social Research (including Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Siegfried Kracauer, and Ernst Bloch). Benjamin is most well-known for his unfinished magnum opus, The Arcades Project (Passengenwerk), as well as the essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” wherein Benjamin marks a shift in the auratic (original, proto-sacred) status of art brought about by new, technical means of reproduction (such as photography and film) which came to dominate the popular imagination. Benjamin moved to Paris after Hitler’s rise to power; subsequently fleeing France just ahead of the German invasion, he was believed to have committed suicide in despair at the French-Spanish border when it seemed likely that he would be captured by Franco’s police.

Henri Bergson (1859–1941) 

Henri Bergson was born in Paris, France in 1859 and lived most of his life in France. He attended Lycée Fontanes and the University of Paris, where he received his doctoral degree.
Bergson was a professor of philosophy who viewed evolution as a creative rather than a mechanistic process (or Darwinian “natural selection”). His influential works include Time and Free Will (1889), Matter and Memory (1896), Creative Evolution (1907), and The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). Bergson’s vitalist philosophy concerning time, memory, and experience – which are more meaningfully to be thought of as occurring subjectively than in ways measurable by clocks and calendars – influenced Modernist thinking and writing. In 1927, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970)

E.M. (Edward Morgan) Forster was born in London in 1879 and attended Cambridge University, where he began associating with artists who would form the Bloomsbury Group. Forster developed a career as a novelist, essayist, and literary critic. In 1910, he published the novel Howards End, which begins with its humanistic epigraph, “Only connect.” This epigraph exemplifies the value Forster placed on “tolerance, good temper and sympathy.” Forster traveled to India in 1914 and again in the 1920s, and he completed the novel A Passage to India (1924) shortly after those travels. Maurice, a semi-autobiographical homosexual love story set in England before the Great War, was published posthumously in 1971.

James George Frazer (1854–1941)

Sir James George Frazer was born in 1854 in Glasgow, Scotland, where he grew up, and attended Trinity College at Cambridge University. He became a prominent social anthropologist who pioneered the modern study of mythology and comparative religion. In 1914, he was knighted in recognition of his anthropological contributions. His most famous work is The Golden Bough (1890), which analyzes the similarities in ancient cults, rites, and myths, including their parallels with early Christianity.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) 

Friedrich Nietzsche was born in Prussia in 1844 and studied at the University of Bonn in Germany. A German philosopher, critic, and classicist, Friedrich Nietzsche challenged prevailing nineteenth-century views of morality, epistemology, and religion, especially Christianity, which he considered decadent, life-denying, nihilistic, and morbid. Along with Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55), Nietzsche is commonly viewed as one of the first existentialist philosophers. One of his well-known works is Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885), wherein he proclaimed the death of God.

Medicine, Science, and Technology

Charles Darwin (1809–82)

Born in England in 1809, Charles Darwin studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and received his college degree from Cambridge. After studying fossils and wildlife around the world during his travels on the HMS Beagle, he originated the concept of natural selection and became the first evolutionary biologist. His most famous work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), details the concept of natural selection and, in its fifth edition, first featured the famous phrase “survival of the fittest.” 

Albert Einstein (1879–1955)   

Albert Einstein was born in 1879 in Ulm, Germany. He studied at Zurich Polytechnic and, after a brief period working at the patent office in Bern, Switzerland, earned a doctorate degree at the University of Zurich. He held a number of academic positions, and his work as a theoretical physicist led to revolutionary discoveries, including the theory of general relativity and the law of the photoelectric effect. Einstein, who received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921, is regarded as the father of modern physics.

Werner Heisenberg (1901–76)

Werner Heisenberg was born in Bavaria, Germany in 1901 and earned his doctoral degree at the University of Munich. A German theoretical physicist, Heisenberg made foundational contributions to quantum mechanics. He is best known for formulating the Uncertainty Principle, which states that a particle’s position and momentum cannot simultaneously both be known with a high degree of certainty. Heisenberg received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1932.

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)

George Bernard Shaw was born in 1856 in Dublin, Ireland, where he lived until the age of 20. Leaving his job as a clerk (which he had held since the age of 15), Shaw moved to London and began writing in 1878. Shaw was heavily influenced by Karl Marx’s Capital and became a fervent advocate of the working class. Shaw was a prolific Irish dramatist who was also a leading music and theatre critic, an active member of the Fabian Society, a co-founder of the London School of Economics, and an outspoken advocate for numerous causes, including women’s rights, pacifism, equal pay for everyone, vegetarianism, and spelling reform. Some of his best-known works include the plays Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893), Men and Supermen (1903), Major Barbara (1905), Pygmalion (1912), and Heartbreak House (1919). Shaw won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, and he won an Oscar in 1938.

John Tyndall (1820–93) 

John Tyndall was born in 1820 in Ireland, where he grew up. He traveled to Germany to study physics at the University of Marburg and shortly thereafter became a professor of physics at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London. An eminent physicist who made several discoveries about atmospheric processes, Tyndall produced 17 books aimed at helping a general audience to understand experimental physics. Some of his best-known works include Heat Considered as a Mode of Motion (1863) and Essays on the Use and Limit of the Imagination in Science (1871).

Politics and War

Kenneth Burke (1897–1993)

Kenneth Burke was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1897. He studied briefly at Ohio State University and then at Columbia University before leaving college to pursue writing. In New York City, Burke associated with modernist writers working in Greenwich Village such as Hart Crane and Malcolm Cowley, an old friend from Burke’s high school years. Burke became a literary critic and philosopher, serving as the editor of modernist literary magazine The Dial in the 1920s. Some of Burke’s most influential works include Permanence and Change (1935) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950).

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915)             

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was born in France and moved to London with Polish writer Sophie Brzeska when he was 19 years old. The couple never married, but he took her surname, and their intense partnership later became the topic of scholarly study and a film. With no formal training, Gaudier-Brzeska began a career as an artist. In his sculptures, Gaudier-Brzeska developed a rough, primitive style of carving that left the tool marks visible on the finished work, thus emphasizing process as much as product. Influenced by Chinese calligraphy and Cubism, Gaudier-Brzeska linked himself with the Vorticism movement of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis; in turn, he strongly impacted the Modernist sculpture that followed him. He enlisted with the French army and was decorated for bravery before being killed in the Great War at the age of 23.        

J.A. Hobson (1858–1940)

J.A. (John Atkinson) Hobson was born in Derby, England and graduated from Oxford. Hobson moved to London in 1887 and became exposed to problems of widespread poverty and inadequate education, as well as poor housing, health, and working conditions. He sought to improve social conditions through the work of progressive societies, journalism, and political campaigning. Hobson engaged economic theories in some of his most noted works, including “Physiology of Industry” (1889), Problems of Poverty (1891), and Evolution of Modern Capitalism (1894). As he establishes in his most famous work, Imperialism (1902), Hobson was also wary of imperialism and political antagonism, as in the “scramble for Africa and Asia ... a retrograde step fraught with grave perils to the cause of civilization.” 

C.L.R. James [“Native Son”] (1901–89)

C.L.R. (Cyril Lionel Robert) James was born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1901, and he lived in Trinidad, England, and America over the course of his life. James was a writer, historian, and political activist with an interest in Caribbean identity and socialist philosophy. James has published under the names “J.R. Johnson” and “Native Son,” and some of his best-known works include World Revolution (1937) and The Black Jacobins (1938), a history of the Haitian Revolution. In addition to his political writing, James was also noted for his writing on the game of cricket, and his book Beyond the Boundary (1963) is widely regarded as a key source on the game.

James Joyce (1882–1941) 

James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 and spent his childhood in Ireland. At University College Dublin, he studied English, French, and Italian and began to engage in fiction writing and literary criticism. Joyce left Ireland for Paris in 1903, briefly returning to tend to his ailing mother; while back in Ireland, Joyce met his wife Nora, and they shared their first date on June 16, 1904, the date on which Joyce later sets the action of his novel Ulysses. Though Joyce and Nora moved to the Continent when he was 22, Joyce remained preoccupied with the Ireland he left behind and wrote almost entirely about it. He was especially bitter about Irish politics, supporting neither British imperialism nor the nationalist movement, but he identified strongly with Charles Stewart Parnell, the so-called “uncrowned king of Ireland,” who, after being caught in an adulterous affair, was denounced from the pulpits of the Irish Catholic churches and, as Joyce viewed it, hounded to his death in 1891.

Joyce wrote nonfiction, poetry, short stories, novels, and a play, but his best known works are Dubliners (1914), a collection of short stories centered around Dublin; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1917), a semi-autobiographical novel about the childhood and adolescence of a young man and the pull he feels towards aesthetics; Ulysses (1922), an epic story told over the course of a single day (June 16); and Finnegans Wake (1939), his final and most stylistically experimental and dense novel, which he described as the book of the dark, or night (compared to Ulysses as a book of the day). As Joyce grew older, he lost his vision and became increasingly reliant on sound; the phonetic wordplay he employs in his later work (particularly the Wake) generates a highly playful, almost musical quality to Joyce’s writing. Two years after publishing Finnegans Wake, Joyce died in Zurich. His wife Nora survived him and was buried by his side.

Rosa Luxemburg (1870–1919)

Rosa Luxemburg was born in Poland while it was under Russian control. After becoming politically active at a young age, Luxemburg moved to Switzerland to escape political persecution and attended Zurich University. A fervent anti-nationalist and an ardent advocate of radical, revolutionary politics, Rosa Luxemburg considered the international working class to be the sole hope of a democratic and socialist future. She advocated the formation of an independent Poland as well as the overthrow of economic capitalism in favor of a socialist order. In 1913, she published The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to an Economic Explanation of Imperialism (1913), and she later published “The Russian Revolution,” denouncing the Bolshevik Revolution as a danger to democracy. In the chaos and criminality of Berlin after Germany’s defeat in the Great War, Rosa Luxemburg was assassinated by the illegal paramilitary organization that would later become Hitler’s Brownshirts.    

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944)

Born to Italian parents in Alexandria, Egypt in 1876, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti spent his childhood living in Egypt. After moving to Paris, Marinetti studied at the Sorbonne, and he later earned a degree in law from Pavia University, though instead of practicing law, Marinetti became a poet, novelist, and critic. Marinetti was best known for The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909), a poetic movement which proclaims the unity of art and life and the necessity of violence and cruelty in both in order to break definitively with the past. He advocated, for example, the destruction of museums, libraries, and “every type of academy” and became a leading voice in glorifying machines, speed, and war. Marinetti, who later became an active supporter of Benito Mussolini, had a significant impact on Wyndham Lewis’ Vorticist movement.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) 

Friedrich Nietzsche was born in Prussia in 1844 and studied at the University of Bonn in Germany. A German philosopher, critic, and classicist, Friedrich Nietzsche challenged prevailing nineteenth-century views of morality, epistemology, and religion, especially Christianity, which he considered decadent, life-denying, nihilistic, and morbid. Along with Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55), Nietzsche is commonly viewed as one of the first existentialist philosophers. One of his well-known works is Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885), wherein he proclaimed the death of God.

Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967)

Siegfried Sassoon was born to a wealthy family in Kent, England in 1886. He grew up in Kent and attended Cambridge University. Sassoon joined the British Army to fight in World War I, and many of his poems draw upon his experience on the front. Sassoon, who began as a gung-ho war supporter, was turned into a fierce pacifist by his experience at war. His “Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration” denounced the War as one of “aggression and conquest” whose “evil and unjust” ends failed to validate the enormous suffering and destruction it was causing and which continued only because of “the callous complacency” of those at home. The poems he wrote in response to World War I marked Sassoon as one of England’s Great War poets commemorated in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. His noted work includes the poetry volume The Old Huntsman (1917) and the novel Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928).

Gender and Sexuality

Edward Carpenter (1844–1929)

Edward Carpenter was born in Hove, England in 1844. He attended Cambridge University, where he became a curate for the Church of England before leaving the church and working as a lecturer and beginning to write poetry. Carpenter became a poet, socialist philosopher and gay rights activist. His influential work “The Intermediate Sex” (1908) posits that there is a wide-ranging spectrum of gender identities containing feminine and masculine “poles” and “intermediate types” somewhere in between. He is also known for his philosophical study Civilisation, Its Cause and Curse (1889). Carpenter’s life-partner was a working-class man named George Merril, and their relationship was said to have influenced E.M. Forster’s posthumously published gay novel Maurice (1971).

Havelock Ellis (1859–1939)

Havelock Ellis was born in Croydon, England in 1859. After traveling in Australia in his youth, he returned to England and attended St. Thomas’s Hospital Medical School in London. Ellis co-wrote an influential medical textbook on homosexuality with the poet and literary critic John Addington Symonds; written around the time of the Oscar Wilde trial, Sexual Inversion (1897) represents homosexuality not as a criminal practice, but, rather, as a congenital predisposition that occurs across various strata of society. Ellis himself was married for 25 years to Edith Lees, a woman who, he recounts in his autobiography My Life (1939), was a lesbian and with whom he had an open marriage until her death in 1916.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) 

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Austria (what was then part of the Austrian Empire is now part of the Czech Republic). His family moved to Vienna, where Freud studied at the University of Vienna, earning his MD in 1881. He briefly studied in Paris with Jean-Martin Carcot, known for his studies of hypnosis and hysteria, and established his own private practice in 1886. Through his research and practice, Sigmund Freud became the most influential psychotherapist of his time, developing important theories about sexual development, dreams, memory, and erotic drive. One such theory was the Oedipal conflict, which had a powerful influence on Modernism, appearing as a significant trope in works such as D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. He later developed theories that accounted for female sexual development as well, which he described in the essay “Female Sexuality,” where he argues that females underwent a complicated dissociation from their primary erotic attachment to the mother. His most influential work includes The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).

Emma Goldman (1869–1940)

Emma Goldman was born in 1869 in Russia (in what is now Lithuania) and moved to the United States of America when she was 16 years old. Soon after moving to New York, Goldman became involved with anarchist movements, working with Johann Most and Alexander Berkman among others. Emma Goldman’s writings and speeches were renowned for combining anarchist fervor with a passion for liberty, social justice, and radical humanist ideals. She summed up her world view in her autobiography, Living My Life (1934), when she wrote, “I want freedom, the right to self expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things” (56). Goldman’s revolutionary vision was founded on the principles of freedom of speech, sexual liberty for all – including homosexuals – and the eradication of property relations in domestic and social life.

She was imprisoned numerous times for her birth control advocacy, anti-war activities, trade unionist organizing, and anarchist acts and speeches. The internationally famous Red Emma’s public speeches attracted growing crowds of the committed and curious; she was deported to Russia in 1919 after the Russian Revolution and in the wake of a Red Scare in the United States.  

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966)

Margaret Sanger was born in New York in 1879 to a Catholic mother who was pregnant 18 times within a period of 22 years. Sanger attended Claverack College in New York and then enrolled in nursing school. After working as a nurse in the lower East Side slums in New York City, Sanger began engaging with social activists (including the writer Upton Sinclair and activist Emma Goldman). She began the newsletter The Woman Rebel in 1914 to inform women on contraceptive methods and in 1916 opened America’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York. Sanger held controversial views on eugenics, including her recommendation that “feeble-minded” individuals take birth control to prevent them from procreating. Through her life, Sanger wrote numerous publications advocating contraception and family planning, and she was involved in numerous court cases fighting to make birth control legal and available in the United States.

John Addington Symonds (1840–93)

The son of a doctor, John Addington Symonds was born in 1840 in Bristol, England. He studied at Oxford University, where he studied first law and then Renaissance literature. He published Renaissance in Italy in seven volumes between 1875–86. In addition to publishing poetry and literary criticism, Symonds co-wrote Sexual Inversion (1897), the influential medical textbook on homosexuality, with the sexologist Havelock Ellis (Ellis completed the book after Symonds’ death in 1893). Symonds himself was married to a woman named Janet Catherine North and also experienced attraction to men, including a four-year affair with Norman Moor, which he described in his autobiographies; much of Symonds’ poetry was inspired by these homoerotic feelings.

Race and Ethnicity

Marita Bonner (1899–1971)

Marita Odette Bonner was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1899. She began her literary apprenticeship writing for The Sagamore, the newspaper at Brookline High School in Massachusetts; she then attended Harvard University’s Radcliffe College, graduating in 1922. She became one of the female writers in the Harlem Renaissance circle, along with Jesse Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nella Larsen. Bonner was an educator, poet, playwright, and essayist who published her work in Opportunity, the journal of the National Urban League, and in The Crisis Magazine, the official publication of the NAACP. The African American independent journals provided a venue for a range of aspiring race-conscious and cosmopolitan writers. Among her most influential works were Bonner’s first professional publication, “On Being Young – a Woman – and Colored,” her play, “The Purple Flower” (1928), and her short stories, including “One Boy’s Story” (1927).

Nancy Cunard (1896–1965)

Nancy Cunard was born to a wealthy British family in England in 1896. Pushing against these roots, she became the Modernist New Woman par excellence: a society debutante turned flapper, she was sexually liberated, politically radical, and tirelessly provocative. While she has often been dismissed as a dilettante, her anti-racist activism led to disinheritance by her family and, when she traveled through America with the African American actor Paul Robeson, anonymous death threats. Cunard wrote poetry and political nonfiction, including Black Man and White Ladyship: An Anniversary (1931), a direct attack aimed at Cunard’s mother, Lady Maud Alice Burke Cunard, who married into the wealthy Cunard family and was a patroness and muse of artists such as the Irish novelist George Moore and the British composer Thomas Beecham, both of whom Cunard also satirizes in the piece. In her work, Cunard advocated a comprehensive dismantling of racist assumptions, and she spoke against contemporary cases of racial injustice such as the Scottsboro Boys trial.   

Charles Darwin (1809–82)

Born in England in 1809, Charles Darwin studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and received his college degree from Cambridge. After studying fossils and wildlife around the world during his travels on the HMS Beagle, he originated the concept of natural selection and became the first evolutionary biologist. His most famous work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), details the concept of natural selection and, in its fifth edition, first featured the famous phrase “survival of the fittest.” 

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)

Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama in 1891, and when she was three years old her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, the first black incorporated community in the United States. Eatonville’s proud African American community and Hurston’s family status enabled her to be raised in a social atmosphere that was relatively untroubled by the virulent and often violent racism that many black people experienced in the deep South. Hurston studied at Howard University and then at Barnard College in New York City, where she was the only black student at the school. She studied anthropology, working with acclaimed Columbia University anthropology professor Franz Boas, and received her degree. Hurston’s interest in folklore and narrative led her to embrace rural and vernacular speech in her literary works – a cause of dissension with some of the Harlem Renaissance’s more self-conscious and cosmopolitan writers. The colorfully exuberant Hurston was a playwright, essayist, anthropologist, and folklorist; her best-known works include Mules and Men (1935; folklore) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937; novel). Her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, was published in 1942. The American writer Alice Walker, who was inspired by Hurston’s work, reclaimed the independent-minded Hurston from obscurity in the 1970s and provided the marker for her previously unmarked grave.

Alain Locke (1886–1954)

Alain Locke was born in Pennsylvania in 1886 and graduated from Harvard University, where he studied English and philosophy. After continuing his studies in Europe as a Rhodes Scholar, Locke became a professor of philosophy at Howard University. Locke’s ground-breaking anthology of African American writing, The New Negro (1925), includes essays, fiction, poetry, plays, and music by such prominent Harlem Renaissance writers as Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes. This anthology provided many readers with their first contact with these writers and their works, and so, like Nancy Cunard’s later anthology Negro (1934), it served both to catalyze and to canonize a literary movement.

Jean Toomer (1894–1967)

Nathan Eugene Pinchback Toomer was born in Washington, DC in 1894 into a distinguished multiracial family. One of his grandfathers, Pinckney Benton Steward Pinchback, was a Union officer during the Civil War. His maternal grandfather was the first African American to serve as Governor in the United States (Louisiana). Both of Jean Toomer’s parents were bi-racial; throughout his life Toomer observed the racial dynamics of the northern and southern United States and continually negotiated his cultural and racial-ethnic identity. He attended alternately all-white and all-black schools as he moved around the country during his childhood, and Toomer attended six different colleges, including the University of Chicago and New York University, though never taking a degree. His modernist masterpiece Cane (1923) represents, in poems and stories, post-World War I’s Great Migration of rural African Americans to northern industrial cities.  

Émile Zola (1840–1902)

Émile Zola was born in Paris, France in 1840. Before his career as a writer was launched, Zola worked as a clerk and a journalist. The publication of his novels soon positioned him as a leading force of French naturalism, as his writing delved into the corners of working-class Paris and explored the psychology of the characters he depicted. His major works includes the series of 20 novels collected under the title Les Rougon-Macquart (1871–1893). Zola was also politically active, and he penned the famed editorial “J’accuse!” (1898), accusing French government officials of complicity in covering up the Dreyfus Affair. Zola died in 1902 when he suffered carbon monoxide poising resulting from a closed chimney (a man later claimed to have purposely closed off Zola’s chimney in retribution for his political beliefs).

Global Modernisms

Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927)

Ryunosuke Akutagawa was born in 1892 in Tokyo. He studied English literature at the Tokyo Imperial University and became an English teacher in Japan before focusing his career entirely on writing. Akutagawa, whose mother experienced a mental breakdown shortly after his birth, struggled with his own mental illness and committed suicide at the age of 35. Akutagawa is known as the “father of the short story” in Japan because he narrates a fragmented, autobiographical portrait of the modern artist through a series of short aphorisms. Ranging in topics from literature to marriage, these aphorisms focus on the conflict between the desires of the individual and the demands of the community. Akutagawa finds sustenance in native Japanese traditions like the haiku and the works of writers such as Baudelaire and Nietzsche, whose own aphorisms may have inspired the unique structure of this work. He is best known for his short stories, of which “In a Grove” and “Rashomon” inspired Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon (1950).

Mulk Raj Anand (1905–2004)

Mulk Raj Anand was born in Peshawar, India in 1905. He studied at the University of Punjab in India and then moved to England, where he studied at the University of London. Politically, Anand became involved with the Indian national movement and Mohandas Gandhi’s satyagraha movement while he was an adolescent; he crossed paths with political figures, including the Fabian suffragist and Irish and Indian nationalist Annie Besant and the poet and Islamic philosopher Muhammad Iqbal. In 1929, he earned a PhD in philosophy from Cambridge University. While in England, Anand briefly worked for the Woolfs at the Hogarth Press and for Eliot at The Criterion, and he later befriended George Orwell, whom he met while working for the BBC in London; his Conversations in Bloomsbury (1981) is a collection of remembered conversations with the London luminaries. Anand’s revolutionary realist literature had Modernist roots. For example, in Untouchable (1935), he sought to expose the irrationality and brutality of the Indian caste system, and the novel’s representation of one day in the life of Bakha the low caste sweeper was partially inspired by Joyce’s Ulysses. Anand’s literary influences also included writers such as D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster, who championed his work and first introduced Anand to Leonard and Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot. In addition to Conversations in Bloomsbury and Untouchable, Anand is also known for his novels Coolie (1936) and Across the Black Waters (1940).

José Martí (1853–95) 

José Martí was born in Havana, Cuba in 1853. When he was 16 years old, Martí was arrested for opposing Spanish rule in Cuba, and he was imprisoned for two years until he was sent to Spain at the age of 18. After his release, he earned a law degree at the University of Saragossa. José Martí’s impassioned plea to Latin Americans to develop ideas from the native soil shapes the rich canon of Latin American Modernism. Like writers of the Harlem Renaissance and the Irish Literary Revival, Martí renounces works that imitate foreign cultures, particularly those of Europe and the United States, and instead, tells his readers to look to their own national traditions, indigenous histories, and natural environments. His best known work includes his poetry, including the collections Ismaelillo (1882), Versos sencillos (1891), and the posthumously published Versos libres (1913). Martí was killed in 1895 fighting against Spain during the war for Cuban independence, which Cuba eventually won.

Munshi Premchand (Dhanpat Rai) (1880–1936)

Munshi Premchand was born in Lamhi, India in 1880. He studied at Queen’s College at Benaras during high school and worked as a teacher and tutor (he later earned his bachelor’s degree from Allahabad in 1919). He partook in an unfulfilling arranged marriage at the age of 15 but later married a Shivarani Devi, then a young widow, when he was 26. His career as a writer coincided with the Indian anti-colonial and independence movements. The British colonial administration labeled his first collection of stories (written under the pen name Nawabrai), Soz-e-Watan (Dirge of the Nation, 1910), seditious, and they confiscated and destroyed the books, at which point he assumed the new pen name, Premchand. In 1921, Premchand quit his job as a teacher in support of Mohandas Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement. Impoverished but undeterred, he continued to write and produced more than three hundred short stories, twelve novels, and two plays over the course of his life. Premchand is renowned for being the father of the Urdu short story, and his writing style celebrates the vernacular poetry heard in everyday speech. Premchand’s Hindi novels, stories, and plays also reflected the spoken dialects of people of both high and low caste origins. His social realist stories examine the politics of everyday relations between rich and poor, landlords and peasants, and women and society. The Indian movie director Satyajit Ray adapted two of Premchand’s literary works, Sadgati (Salvation, 1984; television) and The Chess Players (1977), and his best known novel is The Gift of a Cow (1936).

Lu Xun (Zhou Shuren) (1881–1936)

Lu Xun was born in the province of Xhaoxing, Zhejiang, China in 1881. He grew up in China before moving to Japan to study. He was educated at the Sendai Medical Academy in Sendai, Japan, where he studied medicine from 1904 to 1906 before leaving the school and returning to China. He worked as a teacher in China while beginning to write. Writing in China during a period of revolutionary fervor – the Republic of China had been officially founded in 1912, replacing the Manchu dynasty and ushering in a period of struggle between warlords, nationalists, and communists – Xun believed that literature could and should serve as a political tool. Mao Tse-tung, who would later endorse the revolutionary spirit of Xun’s work, was just beginning to come into power and communism was finding supporters among the peasantry and intelligentsia alike. Against this backdrop, Xun’s most popular work includes the short story “A Madman’s Diary” (1918), which explores the impact of ancient values on modern Chinese society, the short story collection A Call to Arms (1922), and the short story collection Wandering (1925).

Modernist Writers on Themselves

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)

Joseph Conrad was born in Poland in 1857 (in a city that is now part of the Ukraine). Conrad’s father educated him at home, and as a child, Conrad read the work of William Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, among others. Resisting imperial Russian authority, Conrad's parents were arrested, sent into exile, and died young, leaving Conrad an orphan at age 11. At sixteen he went to sea, where he had various adventures including gunrunning and political conspiracy, retiring to England in 1894. In the early 1900s he honed his English language and literary skills, writing in what was probably his fourth language: in addition to Polish, he would have studied Russian in school and learned French when he sailed with the French merchant navy. He gained popular and financial success as an English writer with Chance (1913), which is now viewed as one of his weaker novels. His major works include The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897), Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911). Conrad is viewed as a romantic writer (for his depictions of exotic settings, the challenges faced by men confronting nature, and moral conflict), a conservative (he actively disliked democracy and socialism), and a precursor of Modernism in his treatment of perspectivism, symbolism, and impressionism.

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965)

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1888. He attended Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1910 and in 1914 completed a dissertation on the idealistic philosophy of F.H. Bradley. Eliot also studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and at Oxford, settling in 1914 in England, where he lived the rest of his life. Eliot had been writing poetry since college, but in 1917 he began working at a London bank, where he worked until 1925, at which point he took a job at the publishing firm Faber and Gwyer. Eliot became a British citizen in 1927 when, setting himself against Modernist values, he famously proclaimed himself “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.” Many of his greatest poems, which include “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), “Gerontion” (1920), The Waste Land (1922), and “The Hollow Men” (1925), were dramatic or interior monologues compounded of startling imagery, fragments of contemporary civilization, obscure allusions to other cultures, languages, and literature, and were often written in what has been called the mythic method. Four Quartets (1945), Eliot’s longest and most complex poem, is an extended meditation on time, human existence, and theological meaning. Eliot, who also wrote seven plays, including Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949), and a good deal of literary criticism, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.

Henry James (1843–1916)

Henry James was born in New York City in 1843 into a prominent New England family. His father, Henry James, Sr., was a wealthy intellectual as well as a clergyman, his older brother was the philosopher and psychologist William James, and his sister Alice James was also a writer (celebrated for her posthumously published diaries). As a child, he traveled frequently between Europe and America with his family and was privately educated, reading the classics of American, English, French, and German literature. He attended Harvard Law School at the age of 19 but left to pursue his fiction writing. Having lived most of his adult life in Europe (mainly Paris and England), James became a British citizen in 1915 (in least in part due to America’s reluctance to join the Great War); in 1916 he was awarded the Order of Merit by King George V. His friends included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Thomas Carlyle, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, all of whom had a profound effect on the young James, and later in life he was a close friend of American writer Edith Wharton.

A prolific novelist, short story writer, critic, and playwright, Henry James was regarded as a leader of nineteenth-century literary realism. James’s fiction explores themes of personal morality, individual freedom, and feminism within highly constrained social milieus, as well as clashes between Old and New World customs and values. His writings are commonly divided into three main periods: to 1890, romances narrated using a conventional omniscient point of view; 1890–7, mostly short stories and plays; 1897 on, large works with complex, even convoluted, indirect sentences and paragraphs, relying increasingly on interior monologue and character perspective. His major works include Daisy Miller (1878), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Princess Casamassima (1886), The Aspern Papers (1888), What Maisie Knew (1897), The Turn of the Screw (1898), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), The Beast in the Jungle (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904).

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930)

David Herbert Lawrence, was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire in 1885 to a largely illiterate miner and pridefully intellectual, former schoolteacher. Lawrence was a working-class “scholarship boy” and of the first generation of beneficiaries of educational reform in Great Britain. He attended the prestigious Nottingham High School and Nottingham University. Lawrence’s northern and working-class roots made him a singular figure in early twentieth- century literary England. While an aspiring writer, he worked as a factory clerk and grammar school teacher; Lawrence’s radical anti-materialism and anti-industrialism, continental interests (Friedrich Neitzsche, German philosophy), identification with northern renegades and rebels like the Luddites, and fascination with primitive cultures further distinguished him as an outsider in London’s more genteel literary circles. Lawrence left England in 1919 and lived in Italy for several years, and his travels would take him to Ceylon/Sri Lanka, Australia, and Mexico – where Lawrence became fascinated with the primitivism of Aztec culture, the subject of his novel The Plumed Serpent (1926). Lawrence was plagued by censorship battles and severe respiratory problems throughout his career; undaunted by both, his visionary and rebellious artistic corpus is comprised of a wealth of materials, including paintings, poetry, short stories, plays, essays, literary criticism (including the groundbreaking Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)), poems, and novels. Lawrence’s major works include Sons and Lovers (1913, novel), The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914), The Rainbow (1915, novel), Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923, poetry), and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928, novel). 

Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936)

Luigi Pirandello was born in 1867 in Sicily, Italy to an upper-class family. He attended the University of Palermo and then the University of Rome, where he was expelled for offending a Latin professor, and finally the University of Bonn in Germany, where he earned a PhD in philology in 1891. Writer of half a dozen novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, Pirandello was controversial for both his writings and his politics. In 1925, when Pirandello, with the help of Mussolini, became artistic director and owner of the Teatro d’Arte di Roma, he publicly stated: “I am a Fascist because I am Italian.” Yet some saw his relationship with Mussolini as a calculated career move since he also said, “I’m apolitical, I’m only a man in the world.” After numerous conflicts with fascist leaders, he destroyed his party membership card in front of the secretary-general of the Fascist Party in 1927 and for the rest of his life was watched by the secret police. Yet, and against his wishes, he received a state funeral upon his death. Pirandello was part of a movement in the early twentieth century called theatricalism or anti-illusionism. The theatricalists rejected realist drama – which they thought could not depict the inner life – and relied on the dreamlike, the expressive, and the symbolic.

Pirandello’s tragic farces, which are considered forerunners of Theatre of the Absurd, won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934 for his “bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage.” Some of his most famous works include Right You Are, If You Think You Are (1917), Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), Henry IV (1922), and Tonight We Improvise (1928).

Ezra Pound (1885–1972)   

Ezra Pound was born in Idaho in 1885. He excelled academically and displayed a flair for style: friends recall his wearing pants made of green billiard cloth together with a blue shirt, pink coat, and large sombrero to complement his pointy beard and single turquoise earring. Pound entered the University of Pennsylvania at the age of 15. There, he met Hilda Doolittle, who would become a well-known poet, and later proposed marriage to her (the engagement ended when her father disapproved of Pound). He completed his bachelor’s degree at Hamilton College in New York and returned to the University of Pennsylvania to earn a master’s degree in romance languages. He enrolled in their PhD program but did not complete his dissertation. Pound fled what he considered American puritanism and lived in London 1908-20, where he met Yeats, whom he considered the greatest living poet. Pound wrote prolifically, edited little magazines, discovered and promoted such writers as Eliot, Frost, Joyce, and Hemingway, and was a driving force behind both Imagism and Vorticism.

After the Great War he denounced Jewish financiers, usury, and international capitalism as its cause; moving to Italy in 1924, he embraced Mussolini’s fascism, and later expressed support for Hitler and wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Oswald Mosley. During World War II he made hundreds of radio broadcasts denouncing the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, and Jews. Arrested for treason after it ended, he was deemed unfit to stand trial, was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital in Washington, DC and released in 1958, after a campaign led by writers and literary critics, and lived out his last years in Italy. His major works include Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), Personæ: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound (1926), How to Read (1931), ABC of Economics (1933), Homage to Sextus Propertius (1934), ABC of Reading (1934), Make It New (1935), and his unfinished epic, The Cantos (1917–69).  

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

Oscar Wilde was born in 1854 and raised in Ireland, where he attended Trinity College, Dublin, before moving on to Oxford University in England. While at Oxford, two of his tutors were John Ruskin and Walter Pater who greatly influenced his approach to art. He achieved fame with his plays An Ideal Husband (1894) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), demonstrating the Edwardian ideal in drama. His most famous novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray celebrates youth and beauty. His aesthetic ideals were later held against him in his notorious trials for “acts of gross obscenity,” for which he was imprisoned. He was persecuted for homosexual acts, and even sued his lover’s father, the Marquess of Queensbury, for libel following his condemnation of Wilde as a “posing somdomite [sic].”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

Adeline Virginia Stephen was born in London in 1882 into a family with distinguished literary and artistic roots. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a prominent historian, biographer, ethical philosopher, and scholar whose associates included George Eliot, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and Matthew Arnold. Her mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen, was a renowned beauty with ties to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painters. Woolf was an aspiring writer as a young child; her first submitted publication was to the Victorian children’s magazine Tit Bits. Like many young women of her class, she was educated at home – a cause of great disappointment throughout her life; however, Woolf’s intellectual and scholarly prowess was recognized by her father, who granted her access to his library and afforded her a classical education. Upon her father’s death she and her siblings moved Bloomsbury, where the group of artists and intellectuals who would come to be known as the Bloomsbury Circle formed. The Bloomsbury group included her brothers Thoby and Adrian Stephen and their Cambridge University friends and associates (Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, T.S. Eliot, Roger Fry, and others). In 1912, Virginia Stephen married Leonard Woolf, one of the Cambridge set. She later developed a relationship with the female poet Vita Sackville-West; still, Leonard and Virginia remained married until she died. Virginia Woolf committed suicide in March of 1941, compelled by a fear of World War II’s immanence and by her own bouts of depression.

In 1917, Leonard and Virginia Woolf founded the Hogarth Press, a cutting edge publishing house that published many emerging modernist writers and visual artists. Virginia Woolf’s own literary corpus of essays, short stories, and novels is renowned for her experiments with genre, narration, and form, and her fascination with interiority, consciousness, and temporality. Her best-known works include Mrs. Dalloway (1925, novel), To the Lighthouse (1927, novel), the feminist classic A Room of One’s Own (1929, essay), The Waves (1931, novel), and Three Guineas (1938, essay).

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939)

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin in 1865. He spent his childhood living in Dublin, London, and Sligo (a town in western Ireland where his mother’s family lived). After high school, Yeats briefly attended an art school but left to focus on writing poetry. An Anglo-Irish poet, playwright (deeply influenced by Japanese Noh plays), essayist, autobiographer, spiritualist, and politician, Yeats became a leader of the Irish Literary Revival and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. With his life-long interest in mysticism, spiritualism, occultism, and astrology, Yeats joined such groups as the Dublin Hermetic Order, the Theosophical Society in London, and Rosicrucianism of the Golden Dawn, and engaged in paranormal research, including séances, hermeticism, and automatic writing. Pursuing this last, Yeats and his wife encountered spirits they called “Instructors” who communicated a complex and esoteric system of characters and history, which Yeats captured in A Vision (1925).  After the Irish Free State was established in 1922, Yeats served as a Senator, championing the cause of divorce and helping to select the design for the state’s first currency. In 1923 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature for what the awards committee described as “inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.” He also flirted with fascism, aligning himself with Pound and praising Benito Mussolini.  

Modernist Writers on Their Contemporaries

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886–1961)

Hilda Doolittle was born in Pennsylvania in 1886 to a family of 6 children, amongst whom she was the only girl. When her father accepted a job at the University of Pennsylvania, Doolittle met the poet Ezra Pound, who was a student there at the time, and they became briefly engaged (until her father’s disapproval drove Pound away). Doolittle attended Bryn Mawr College for two years, and she moved to London in 1911. There, she became a central member of the imagist movement, a poetic movement wherein poets rely upon images (rather than explanation or rhythm) to create emotion. Doolittle reconnected with Pound, another proponent of Imagism, in London, and in 1913, she married poet Richard Aldington, who was also a member of this circle. Her marriage to Aldington ended during World War I, and Doolittle moved to Vienna to raise her daughter. In the 1930s, she became a patient of Sigmund Freud, whose analysis of the unconscious paralleled her own poetic technique of coding images with personal meaning. When Hitler rose to power in Austria, she played a prominent role in helping Freud get to London.

Her best-known work includes Trilogy (1946), three long poems inspired by World War II, and the epic poem Helen in Egypt (1955), inspired by the voice she imagined for Helen of Troy from Homer’s Iliad.

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965)

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1888. He attended Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1910 and in 1914 completed a dissertation on the idealistic philosophy of F.H. Bradley. Eliot also studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and at Oxford, settling in 1914 in England, where he lived the rest of his life. Eliot had been writing poetry since college, but in 1917 he began working at a London bank, where he worked until 1925, at which point he took a job at the publishing firm Faber and Gwyer. Eliot became a British citizen in 1927 when, setting himself against Modernist values, he famously proclaimed himself “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.” Many of his greatest poems, which include “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), “Gerontion” (1920), The Waste Land (1922), and “The Hollow Men” (1925), were dramatic or interior monologues compounded of startling imagery, fragments of contemporary civilization, obscure allusions to other cultures, languages, and literature, and were often written in what has been called the mythic method. Four Quartets (1945), Eliot’s longest and most complex poem, is an extended meditation on time, human existence, and theological meaning. Eliot, who also wrote seven plays, including Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949), and a good deal of literary criticism, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.

Ralph Ellison (1914-94)

Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma in 1914. Named for the American Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ellison was raised in Oklahoma City, one of the great American jazz cities in the 1920s and ’30s. He trained as a trumpet player and pianist at Oklahoma City’s Frederick Douglass School and at the Tuskegee Institute’s renowned music program; while studying there in the 1930s, he became an appreciator of Alain Locke’s New Negro Movement and an aficionado of Modernist literature. Ellison frequently spoke of Eliot’s The Waste Land as a groundbreaking work for him as an artist and intellectual. After leaving Tuskegee in 1936, he moved to Harlem in New York City to study sculpture and the visual arts. In Harlem, both Richard Wright and Langston Hughes encouraged Ellison’s writing talents. Ellison wrote reviews and columns for scholarly journals and publications including Negro Quarterly, New Challenge, New Masses, and High Fidelity. In 1938 Ellison worked for the Depression-era Federal Writers’ Project, where his interests in American folk cultures intensified. This combination of American, cosmopolitan, and Modernist influences emerges in his writing. Ellison is best known for his novel, Invisible Man (1952), which he began writing in 1945 and which won the National Book Award in 1953.

E.M. Forster (1879–1970)

E.M. (Edward Morgan) Forster was born in London in 1879 and attended Cambridge University, where he began associating with artists who would form the Bloomsbury Group. Forster developed a career as a novelist, essayist, and literary critic. In 1910, he published the novel Howards End, which begins with its humanistic epigraph, “Only connect.” This epigraph exemplifies the value Forster placed on “tolerance, good temper and sympathy.” Forster traveled to India in 1914 and again in the 1920s, and he completed the novel A Passage to India (1924) shortly after those travels. Maurice, a semi-autobiographical homosexual love story set in England before the Great War, was published posthumously in 1971.

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930)

David Herbert Lawrence, was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire in 1885 to a largely illiterate miner and pridefully intellectual, former schoolteacher. Lawrence was a working-class “scholarship boy” and of the first generation of beneficiaries of educational reform in Great Britain. He attended the prestigious Nottingham High School and Nottingham University. Lawrence’s northern and working-class roots made him a singular figure in early twentieth-century literary England. While an aspiring writer, he worked as a factory clerk and grammar school teacher; Lawrence’s radical anti-materialism and anti-industrialism, continental interests (Friedrich Neitzsche, German philosophy), identification with northern renegades and rebels like the Luddites, and fascination with primitive cultures further distinguished him as an outsider in London’s more genteel literary circles. Lawrence left England in 1919 and lived in Italy for several years, and his travels would take him to Ceylon/Sri Lanka, Australia, and Mexico – where Lawrence became fascinated with the primitivism of Aztec culture, the subject of his novel The Plumed Serpent (1926). Lawrence was plagued by censorship battles and severe respiratory problems throughout his career; undaunted by both, his visionary and rebellious artistic corpus is comprised of a wealth of materials, including paintings, poetry, short stories, plays, essays, literary criticism (including the groundbreaking Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)), poems, and novels. Lawrence’s major works include Sons and Lovers (1913, novel), The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914), The Rainbow (1915, novel), Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923, poetry), and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928, novel). 

Mina Loy (1882–1966)     

Mina Loy was born in London in 1882. She was trained as a painter in London, Munich, and Paris, and several of her works were included in Paris’s Salon d’Automne in 1905. After living in Paris for several years and becoming familiar with Gertrude and Leo Stein and that city’s bohemian and avant-garde circles (including Apollinaire and Picasso), Loy moved to Greenwich Village, New York in 1916. Loy was a New Woman and feminist, poet, playwright, craftswoman, and conceptual artist; she was also affiliated for a time – romantically and intellectually – with Marinetti and the Futurists. Her “Aphorisms on Futurism” (1914) were published in Alfred Steiglitz’s magazine Camera Work. Loy’s 1918 “Feminist Manifesto” notes her break with Marinetti and with the Futurists’ misogyny and fascism. In New York, Loy became affiliated with Arthur Kreymbourg, Man Ray, William Carlos Williams, and the renegade poets of the little magazine, Others. Her frankly irreverent, erotic and uninhibited “Love Songs” (1915) helped to initiate Others and scandalized some of her contemporaries with their images of “laughing honey/And spermatozoa,” “lunar lusts,” saliva, and vivid flesh “tumbling together.” In her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Gertrude Stein describes the incomparable Loy as the “Curie/of the laboratory/of vocabulary.” Loy was embraced by Williams, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes, and Marcel Duchamp; she also became a favorite of the New York Dadaists. Her poems were published in several little magazines, including Trend, Rogue, and The Dial.  

Louis MacNeice (1907–63)

Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast, Ireland in 1907 and educated in England at Oxford, where he met the poets W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day-Lewis. MacNeice became widely regarded as a poet with his 1935 collection, Poems. Although nominally part of the group of 1930s poets that Roy Campbell disparagingly labelled “Macspaunday” – an amalgam of the names MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, and Cecil Day Lewis – MacNeice was never completely in sync with his poetic peers. What he did share with the 1930s poets was an Oxford education, affiliations (albeit loose) with socialism, and a politically engaged poetics that aligned documentary-style detail with traditional poetic forms and genres. MacNeice was a poet and a playwright, known for his plays Christopher Columbus (1944) and The Dark Tower (1946), which were originally written for the radio, and for his volumes of poetry Poems (1935), Letters from Iceland (1937, written in collaboration with W.H. Auden), and Autumn Journal (1939).

Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939)     

Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford’s original name, which he changed during World War I because of its Germanic resonance) was born in Surrey, England in 1873. He was educated in London at University College School for his secondary education but never attended college. In the early 1900s he collaborated with Joseph Conrad on three novels generally considered important to their creative development though not successful in their own right. During the war he worked for the War Propaganda Bureau and then served on the Western Front, where much of Parade’s End is set. He was a great supporter of literary innovation and a generous editor, first of The English Review (which published Conrad, Norman Douglas, John Galsworthy, Hardy, James, D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, H.G. Wells, and Yeats) and then The Transatlantic Review (whose writers included Hemingway, Joyce, Pound, Jean Rhys, and Gertrude Stein). His criticism includes The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad (1929), an accessible overview of the development of the English novel, and memoirs and reviews of many of his contemporaries, especially Conrad. Ford was a prolific novelist, poet, memoirist, and literary critic best known for The Fifth Queen trilogy (1906–08), The Good Soldier (1915), and the Parade’s End tetralogy (1924–8).

Ezra Pound (1885–1972)   

Ezra Pound was born in Idaho in 1885. He excelled academically and displayed a flair for style: friends recall his wearing pants made of green billiard cloth together with a blue shirt, pink coat, and large sombrero to complement his pointy beard and single turquoise earring. Pound entered the University of Pennsylvania at the age of 15. There, he met Hilda Doolittle, who would become a well-known poet, and later proposed marriage to her (the engagement ended when her father disapproved of Pound). He completed his bachelor’s degree at Hamilton College in New York and returned to the University of Pennsylvania to earn a master’s degree in romance languages. He enrolled in their PhD program but did not complete his dissertation. Pound fled what he considered American puritanism and lived in London 1908-20, where he met Yeats, whom he considered the greatest living poet. Pound wrote prolifically, edited little magazines, discovered and promoted such writers as Eliot, Frost, Joyce, and Hemingway, and was a driving force behind both Imagism and Vorticism.

After the Great War he denounced Jewish financiers, usury, and international capitalism as its cause; moving to Italy in 1924, he embraced Mussolini’s fascism, and later expressed support for Hitler and wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Oswald Mosley. During World War II he made hundreds of radio broadcasts denouncing the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, and Jews. Arrested for treason after it ended, he was deemed unfit to stand trial, was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital in Washington, DC and released in 1958, after a campaign led by writers and literary critics, and lived out his last years in Italy. His major works include Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), Personæ: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound (1926), How to Read (1931), ABC of Economics (1933), Homage to Sextus Propertius (1934), ABC of Reading (1934), Make It New (1935), and his unfinished epic, The Cantos (1917–69).

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)

George Bernard Shaw was born in 1856 in Dublin, Ireland, where he lived until the age of 20. Leaving his job as a clerk (which he had held since the age of 15), Shaw moved to London and began writing in 1878. Shaw was heavily influenced by Karl Marx’s Capital and became a fervent advocate of the working class.  Shaw was a prolific Irish dramatist who was also a leading music and theatre critic, an active member of the Fabian Society, a co-founder of the London School of Economics, and an outspoken advocate for numerous causes, including women’s rights, pacifism, equal pay for everyone, vegetarianism, and spelling reform. Some of his best-known works include the plays Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893), Men and Supermen (1903), Major Barbara (1905), Pygmalion (1912), and Heartbreak House (1919). Shaw won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, and he won an Oscar in 1938.

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

Adeline Virginia Stephen was born in London in 1882 into a family with distinguished literary and artistic roots. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a prominent historian, biographer, ethical philosopher, and scholar whose associates included George Eliot, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and Matthew Arnold. Her mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen, was a renowned beauty with ties to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painters. Woolf was an aspiring writer as a young child; her first submitted publication was to the Victorian children’s magazine Tit Bits. Like many young women of her class, she was educated at home – a cause of great disappointment throughout her life; however, Woolf’s intellectual and scholarly prowess was recognized by her father, who granted her access to his library and afforded her a classical education. Upon her father’s death she and her siblings moved Bloomsbury, where the group of artists and intellectuals who would come to be known as the Bloomsbury Circle formed. The Bloomsbury group included her brothers Thoby and Adrian Stephen and their Cambridge University friends and associates (Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, T.S. Eliot, Roger Fry, and others). In 1912, Virginia Stephen married Leonard Woolf, one of the Cambridge set. She later developed a relationship with the female poet Vita Sackville-West; still, Leonard and Virginia remained married until she died. Virginia Woolf committed suicide in March of 1941, compelled by a fear of World War II’s immanence and by her own bouts of depression.

In 1917, Leonard and Virginia Woolf founded the Hogarth Press, a cutting edge publishing house that published many emerging Modernist writers and visual artists. Virginia Woolf’s own literary corpus of essays, short stories, and novels is renowned for her experiments with genre, narration, and form, and her fascination with interiority, consciousness, and temporality. Her best-known works include Mrs. Dalloway (1925, novel), To the Lighthouse (1927, novel), the feminist classic A Room of One’s Own (1929, essay), The Waves (1931, novel), and Three Guineas (1938, essay).