Midnight at Midcentury

“Three gulls wheel above the broken boxes, orangerinds, spoiled cabbage heads that heave between the splintered plank walls, the green waves spume under the round bows as the jerry, skidding on the tide, crashes, gulps the broken water, slides, settles slowly into the slip…”

So John Dos Passos, more than thirty-five years ago, brought Bud Korpenning to New York in Manhattan Transfer. This was 1925; and what a time it was for the American novel! This same year saw Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, Dreiser’s American Tragedy, Sinclair Lewis’ Arrowsmith, Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter, Ellen Glasgow’s Barren Ground, and John Erskine’s Private Life of Helen of Troy. Hemingway was at work on The Sun Also Rises, and Faulkner on Mosquitoes.

JJ

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James Jackson Kilpatrick

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“Three gulls wheel above the broken boxes, orangerinds, spoiled cabbage heads that heave between the splintered plank walls, the green waves spume under the round bows as the jerry, skidding on the tide, crashes, gulps the broken water, slides, settles slowly into the slip…”

So John Dos Passos, more than thirty-five years ago, brought Bud Korpenning to New York in Manhattan Transfer. This was 1925; and what a time it was for the American novel! This same year saw Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, Dreiser’s American Tragedy, Sinclair Lewis’ Arrowsmith, Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter, Ellen Glasgow’s Barren Ground, and John Erskine’s Private Life of Helen of Troy. Hemingway was at work on The Sun Also Rises, and Faulkner on Mosquitoes.