Representative Authors
T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri. He pursued his studies at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford, focusing on philosophy and writing a dissertation on logician F. H. Bradley. During his college years, Eliot began composing poetry, but his discovery of French Symbolist poetry in 1908 radically changed his perspective on literature. In the 1910s, Ezra Pound encountered Eliot's work and immediately decided that Eliot should join his literary circle. Pound championed Eliot to Harriet Monroe of Poetry magazine, resulting in the publication of Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1915. Around that time, Eliot moved to London and married the emotionally unstable Vivienne Haigh-Wood. He struggled to earn a living, working as a teacher and later at Lloyd’s Bank until 1925.
In 1922, Eliot achieved significant success with his poem “The Waste Land.” The manuscript reveals that Ezra Pound had a substantial role in its editing. “The Waste Land” catapulted Eliot to fame and established him as a central figure in the emerging modernist movement. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Eliot utilized his newfound fame and his roles as editor of the literary journal The Criterion and managing editor at Faber & Faber to advocate for a new literary evaluation standard. In his critical essays and poetry, he criticized the romantics and neoclassicists while praising Dante and the Elizabethan “metaphysical” poets. He emphasized the importance of “Tradition” in literature and opposed the romantic idea of individual genius.
For the rest of his life, Eliot remained a respected literary figure. He continued writing poetry, including the Four Quartets, although he was not highly prolific. He became a symbol of the conservative, royalist, High Church English gentleman. Eliot passed away on January 4, 1965, epitomizing the literary establishment.
William Faulkner (1897–1962)
William Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, into a family with strong Mississippi and Confederate ties. He grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, and briefly attended the University of Mississippi before leaving to pursue a writing career. In New Orleans, he was mentored by Sherwood Anderson and published his first book, The Marble Faun, a collection of short stories, in 1924. His first novel set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Sartoris, was published in 1929, followed by masterpieces like The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Faulkner received significant critical acclaim but struggled to achieve financial success. In an attempt to improve his financial situation, he wrote two sensationalistic novels, Sanctuary and Requiem for a Nun, and briefly worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Faulkner passed away on July 6, 1962, in Byhalia, Mississippi.
James Joyce (1882–1941)
James Joyce stands as the foremost writer of the modernist movement. Although his body of work is relatively small, it spans various genres, including poetry, drama, short stories, and the novel that the Modern Library deemed the most significant of the twentieth century. His life mirrored many of Modernism’s central themes: exile, the influence of the past, a deep engagement with diverse cultures and historical periods, and self-destruction.
Born on February 2, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland, Joyce hailed from a lower middle-class Catholic family. His father passed away when Joyce was young. He attended Catholic schools in Ireland and later enrolled at University College, Dublin. During his youth and college years, he grappled with the strictures of Catholic education and Irish nationalism. In 1902, Joyce left Dublin for Paris but returned when his mother became ill. He left Dublin again in 1904,...
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accompanied by Nora Barnacle, a lively yet uneducated young woman (whom he married in 1931). For many years, Joyce faced financial difficulties while trying to support his growing family. He initially settled in Trieste and later in Zurich, where he taught literature and occasionally received monetary grants.
During this period, Joyce wrote and published stories, poems, and a novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. His story collection, Dubliners, was published in 1914 and quickly attracted the attention of the Anglo-American avant-garde while drawing criticism from the Irish literary scene. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is a stream-of-consciousness narrative that closely mirrors Joyce’s own life (thinly veiled as “Stephen Dedalus”) up to his departure from Ireland. In 1922, Joyce published his magnum opus, Ulysses, regarded as the pinnacle of Modernist literature. This reimagining of the Odysseus myth through the character of a Jewish advertising salesman in Dublin is a masterwork on every level. The book was immediately banned in England and America for blasphemy and obscenity, and it wasn’t until 1934 that it became legal in the United States.
After completing Ulysses, Joyce embarked on another lengthy novel, initially referred to as Work in Progress during its creation. By this time, Joyce had established himself as the preeminent modernist writer, residing in Paris and enjoying the adulation of both the Lost Generation Americans and the city's more esteemed authors. Even before any portion of Work in Progress was published, it was celebrated. When it was finally released as Finnegans Wake in 1939, it stunned readers with its relentless wordplay. The novel is extremely challenging, often barely recognizable as English, but its complex structure and masterful use of the English language's full potential ensure that readers will continue to explore its depths for many years. After completing Finnegans Wake, Joyce and Nora relocated to Zurich to escape the Nazi occupation of Paris. Joyce passed away in Zurich on January 13, 1941, following surgery for a perforated ulcer.
Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
In numerous ways, Ezra Pound can be considered the father of literary Modernism. If for no other reason, he almost single-handedly introduced the techniques of Modernism to American poets while simultaneously bringing the talents of American modernist poets to the attention of the avant-garde community. Born in Hailey, Idaho, on October 30, 1885, Pound's family soon moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia. He grew up in that region and attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he met William Carlos Williams and another significant American modernist poet, Hilda Doolittle, as well as Hamilton College. After a brief period teaching at a small college in Indiana, Pound became disillusioned with what he perceived as American narrow-mindedness and moved to Venice, Italy.
In Venice, Pound committed himself to becoming a poet. He published a book there but soon relocated to London. During his decade in London, Pound, through sheer force of will, initiated movements and positioned himself at their center. Perhaps the most significant of these movements was Imagism, a school of poetry that explicitly rejected Victorian verse models by presenting images without authorial commentary. In 1920, Pound left London for Paris, where he spent a few years before growing frustrated with Gertrude Stein's dominance in the avant-garde scene. In 1925, he moved to Rapallo, Italy, where he developed a strong affinity for Mussolini and Italian fascism. During this period, he also began to work earnestly on The Cantos, the epic poem that would become his magnum opus.
Pound resided in Italy for over two decades. Throughout World War II, he broadcasted on Italian state radio to American soldiers. In 1943, these actions led to his indictment for treason. By 1945, he returned to the United States to stand trial. Deemed mentally unfit to defend himself, Pound was confined to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Washington, D.C. for thirteen years. Due to the intervention of notable figures like T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Ernest Hemingway, Pound was released in 1958 and permitted to return to Italy. He settled in Venice, where he published a few more books before falling silent by the mid-1960s. Pound passed away in Venice, Italy, on November 1, 1972.
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
Born on January 25, 1882, Woolf encountered many prominent Victorians during her youth. In 1904, she relocated to the Bloomsbury district of London, a neighborhood that lent its name to Woolf’s intellectual and literary circle. She married journalist Leonard Woolf, and in 1917, the couple founded the Hogarth Press. This significant literary and cultural publishing firm released the first English-language editions of Freud’s works and T. S. Eliot’s early collection Poems (1919).
Starting in the late 1910s, Woolf began her writing career. She quickly absorbed Freud's discoveries and the literary innovations of the modernists, producing several sophisticated novels: Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and To the Lighthouse (1927). Her works gave the “stream-of-consciousness” style new depth and potential. Besides her literary contributions, Woolf infused her feminist perspective and bisexual lifestyle into her writings. In works like Three Guineas (1938), A Room of One’s Own (1929), and Orlando (1928), she articulated revolutionary views for her era. Despite her professional success, Woolf’s personal life was fraught with challenges. By the 1930s, she grew increasingly anxious about suffering from a mental illness and feared becoming a burden to her husband and friends. This anxiety, coupled with her fear of World War II, led her to commit suicide by drowning on March 28, 1941.
