ABSTRACT
Modernism began with an energetic ambition to tell America's twentieth century story. The power of the common in language and idiom, in narrative structures, in belief systems and morality became one root of the modernist aesthetic. Famed as being the first, and best, psychological study of a soldier in war, Crane's 1895 novella was written without its author having been to war. In June Howard's assessment of the centrality Dreiser's Sister Carrie holds in any discussion of American realism, she thinks Carrie is more than superficially bold. In the long view of twenty-first century readers, Jack London himself seems to be the epitome of that mongrel impact and not only in his writing. The Sea Wolf becomes a predictable romance: Van Weyden watches Wolf's attraction to Maud Brewster grow. Gertrude Stein wrote as a Jewish woman, highly educated at the Harvard Annex under the tutelage of William James, and then as a medical student at Johns Hopkins Medical School.
