Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945)

Dreiser began writing with his first novel “Sister Carrie”, where he portrayed a country girl who moves to Chicago and becomes a kept woman.

Dreiser continued his career by publishing “The Financier” (1912) and “The Titan” (1914), both of which began his trilogy about the rise of a tycoon. Fame arrived with his “An American Tragedy” (1925), a story based on newspaper accounts of a sensational murder case. It is about a young man trying to succeed in a materialistic society. This novel was turned into a Broadway drama and later sold to Hollywood.

With his new success, Dreiser took a trip to Russia but came away unimpressed. He chronicled his observations in “Dreiser Looks at Russia” (1928). Dreiser became a communist in later years, and focused his attention on writing political treatises such as “America is Worth Saving” (1941).

Considered by many as the leader of Naturalism in American writing, Dreiser is also remembered for his stinging criticism of the genteel tradition and of what Howells described as the "smiling aspects of life" typifying America. In his fiction, Dreiser deals with social problems and with characters who struggle to survive. His sympathetic treatment of a "morally loose" woman in “Sister Carrie” was called immoral and he suffered at the hands of publishers. One of Dreiser's favorite fictional devices was the use of contrast between the rich and the poor, the urbane and the unsophisticated, and the power brokers and the helpless. While he wrote about "raw" experiences of life in his earlier works, in his later writing he considered the impact of economic society on the lives of people in the remarkable trilogy – “The Financier”, “The Titan”, and “The Stoic”.

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)

She was a passionate advocate for the "new" in art, her literary friendships grew to include writers as diverse as F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway. It was to Hemingway that Stein coined the phrase "the lost generation" to describe the expatriate writers living abroad between the wars.

By 1913, Stein's support of cubist painters and her increasingly avant-garde writing caused a split with her brother Leo, who moved to Florence. Her first book “Three Lives” was published in 1909. She followed it with “Tender Buttons” in 1914.

“Tender Buttons” clearly showed the profound effect modern painting had on her writing. In these small prose poems, images and phrases come together in often surprising ways – similar in manner to cubist painting. Her writing, characterized by its use of words for their associations and sounds rather than their meanings, received considerable interest from other artists and writers, but did not find a wide audience.

Among Stein's most influential works are “The Making of Americans” (1925); “How to Write” (1931); “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” (1933), which was a best-seller; and “Stanzas in Meditation and Other Poems [1929-1933]” (1956).

Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened a seminal exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers.

His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his promulgation of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry – stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter. His later work, for nearly fifty years, focused on the encyclopedic epic poem he entitled “The Cantos”.

In 1924, he moved to Italy; during this period of voluntary exile, Pound became involved in Fascist politics, and did not return to the United States until 1945, when he was arrested on charges of treason for broadcasting Fascist propaganda by radio to the United States during the Second World War. In 1948 he got prize for the “Pisan Cantos”. His work is complex, sometimes obscure, with multiple references to other art forms and to a vast range of literature, both Western and Eastern. He influenced many other poets, notably T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), another expatriate.