Modernist literature was at its height from 1900 to 1940 , and featured such authors as Knut Hamsun , Vladimir Nabokov , T. S. Eliot , James Joyce , William Faulkner , Ernest Hemingway , Franz Kafka , Joseph Conrad , Virginia Woolf , Andrei Bely , W.B. Yeats , F. Scott Fitzgerald , Ezra Pound , D.H. Lawrence , Katherine Mansfield , Gertrude Stein , H.D. , Jaroslav HaÅ ek , Samuel Beckett , Menno ter Braak , Marcel Proust , Thomas Mann , Mikhail Bulgakov , Robert Frost and Boris Pasternak . Modernist authors include Knut Hamsun ( whose novel Hunger might be a worthy consideration for the first modernist novel ) , James Joyce , Mikhail Bulgakov , T. S. Eliot , Gertrude Stein , H.D. , Virginia Woolf , Marcel Proust , John Steinbeck , Dylan Thomas , D. H. Lawrence , Paul Laurence Dunbar , Ezra Pound , Mina Loy , Hugh MacDiarmid , William Faulkner , Jean Toomer , Ernest Hemingway , John Dos Passos , Katherine Anne Porter , E. M. Forster , Rainer Maria Rilke , Franz Kafka , Robert Musil , Joseph Conrad , Andrei Bely , W. B. Yeats , F. Scott Fitzgerald , Luigi Pirandello , Carlo Emilio Gadda , Aldo Palazzeschi , Italo Svevo , Federigo Tozzi , Katherine Mansfield , Jaroslav HaÅ ek , Samuel Beckett , Menno ter Braak , Robert Frost , Boris Pasternak , Djuna Barnes , Patricia Highsmith , Sherwood Anderson , Mervyn Peake , Ivan Cankar among others .