Chapter 9

America in the Modern World: 1913–1945

Ezra Pound, In a Station of the Metro; A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste

Robert Frost, Reluctance; Mending Wall; Fire and Ice

Marsden Hartley, Portrait of a German Officer (painting)

Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Edna St. Vincent Millay, First Fig

Marianne Moore, Poetry

Claude McKay, If We Must Die

Theodore Dreiser, A Certain Oil Refinery

E. E. Cummings, in Just-

Langston Hughes, The Negro Speaks of Rivers

William Carlos Williams, The Great Figure; This Is Just to Say

T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

Zora Neale Hurston, How It Feels to Be Colored Me

Ernest Hemingway, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

Edith Wharton, Roman Fever

Eleanor Roosevelt, What Libraries Mean to the Nation

Works Progress Administration, Bookmobile, Louisiana (photograph)

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Second Inaugural Address: One-Third of a Nation

John Steinbeck, The Chrysanthemums

William Faulkner, Barn Burning

W. H. Auden, The Unknown Citizen

Richard Wright, The Man Who Was Almost a Man

Randall Jarrell, The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

Harry S. Truman, Statement by the President of the United States

Conversation | The Influence of Jazz

Conversation | Japanese Internment and Reparations: Making It Right?

Conversation | What Is American Literature?