Literature: An American Voice Emerges

Midwestern Influences.

As in art, American literature during the 1910s was dominated by writers trying to break free of older, usually European models, to find their own subject matter in their own country, and to create new forms and styles of writing. If the art, theater, and music worlds revolved around New York City, American literature during the 1910s came primarily from writers of the country's heartland: Willa Cather (Nebraska), Booth Tarkington and Theodore Dreiser (Indiana), Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg (Illinois), and Sherwood Anderson (Ohio). Hamlin Garland, whose short stories and novels were influential in the first decade of the new century and beyond, published his autobiography, A Son of the Middle Border (1917), about growing up in Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota. During the 1910s Chicago became an important literary base, giving rise to the literary phenomenon known as the Chicago...

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