American Fiction of the 1920s

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The 1920s can be considered the first truly modern American decade, an era that saw the rise of broadcast media, professional sports, sexual freedom, and aesthetic innovation, while also seeing a distressing resurgence of nationalist and exclusionary forces. The 1920s was thus a decade that irrevocably changed American fiction and still resonates a hundred years later. We will read both famous works by well-known names and newly canonical novels by previously underrepresented figures, Readings include F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise; Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt;  Willa Cather, The Professor's House;  Jessie Fauset, There Is Confusion, Edna Ferber, So Big;  Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury; W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess

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