19. American literature

First american writters who become well famous were Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain. They were representatives of American romanticism.

Edgar Allan Poe
He was born in Boston. He got married his cousin Virginia. He wrote a detective story fiction, poet and literary critic. His parents were travelling actors and they died before he was two. He studied at the University of Virginia. He had problem with alcohol. Poem – The Raven, The Black Cat, The Gold Bug.

Mark Twain
is one of the greatest. He became famous as a humorist and story teller. His novel The Gilded Age gave the name to the whole period after the Civil war. This book is a bitter satire on one period of the get-rich -quick years in the second half of the 19th century. His best books are based on his own experiences along the Mississippi – The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. These books describe the adventures of boyhood. Huck is portrait of a frontier boy.

THE LOST GENERATION AND ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The twenties in American literature were characterized by an econemic boom after World War I and by the Jazz Age, the wild marry life of the young, and their desillusionment and pessismism; the Lost generation, best expressed by the prose writer.