Unit Five: The Harlem Renaissance and Modernism

The women of this age were in uproar and ready to make a change. And, what better way to make a change than to write? Many women, such as Dorothy Parker, wrote about their freedoms, rights, and values (and the contrast between those and traditional values). And for a while, not only were the women happy, but so were the men--until the Great Depression. It brought forth a new type of writing that described their despair called Realism. Despite his attempts, F.D. Roosevelt could not help everyone. Modernism, Imagism, and Objectivism all came from the age--and so did the popularization of the Short Story. In such a rushed society, many didn't want to waste their time reading long novels--or writing them. Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck among them, many authors instead turned to short stories.