Реферат: Jospeh Freeman

to first place. It is an economy that has made Russia strong, given her the lead so far in

the conquest of outer space and his made her the model of half the world in Asia, Africa

and part of Europe.

This has been a most expensive process — material progress at the cost of life,

freedom and humanity on a gigantic scale. But it is there for better or for worse. And at

this moment it is fascinating people in this country. Not the writers and artists and

actors who were fascinated by Russian economic progress in the Thirties. These are today

totally disillusioned with Russia. The Americans who are today fascinated by Russia’s

economic progress are our big businessmen and financiers.

Finally, the Nineteen Thirties was a decade of great creative power in American

literature and the arts; more creative, in my opinion, that the Nineteen Fifties have been

so far – and this decade has only nineteenth more months to go.

———-

You may be surprised to hear that the Thirties was creative. Legend says different.

That was the age of "social consciousness" in the arts, of political radicalism

among writers and artists, of "proletarian literature." And, the legend goes,

there was a lot of smoke but little fire.

We are too close to the Thirties to see them in proper perspective. We are still

absorbing and re-evaluating the Twenties, which until recently were also considered

sterile. Soon there will be books about the Thirties written with perspective and

we shall see how creative that decade actually was.

Take the novel. True, we did not have with us in those days the new writers who

nowadays make the best-seller lists and crowd the little reviews. But we managed somehow

with Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, James T. Farrell, Josephine

Herbst, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood

Anderson.

In poetry we did not have the San Francisco School. But T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost

were at the height of their powers and so were Edna St. Vincent Millay, Carl

Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Robinson Jeffers, Louise