ABSTRACT
A great many American novels have been characterized by what can only be called an ‘epic quality’. Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Stein beck^ The Grapes of Wrath, and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha saga are only a few of the more prominent examples. There are obvious reasons why twentieth-century American writers 一 and this is even more true of poets than novelists - should continue to celebrate the national spirit long after such manifestations virtually disappeared in Europe. The need arises partly from a desire to affirm that there is such an entity as America — a proposition by no means self-evident to many observers in the early decades of the twentieth century — and partly from an even stronger desire to create an identity for Americans, distinct from their European, Asian, or African inheritance. One way of attempting this —as in the above novels - was through the creation of microcosmic groups or representative individuals whose lives could be used to symbolize essential American experience. What distinguishes the fiction of Thomas Wolfe and John Dos Passos, on the other hand, is its inclusiveness. Each of them, in very different ways, set out with much larger ambition, to capture the totality of life on the continent in all its bewildering variety and complexity. In trying to fulfil such grandiose aims，they were faced with almost insuperable difficulties of form and technique’ and the manner in which they coped, or failed to cope, with these problems constitutes another chapter in the history of American Modernism.
