Title: The American Dream in the Twentieth Century | Encyclopedia.com
Headings: The American Dream in the Twentieth Century
The American Dream in the Twentieth Century
The American Dream in the Twentieth Century
Introduction
Small-Town Life
Questioning Conventions
The Depression
Emerging Superpower
Disillusionment
Modern War
Counterculture
Age of Excess
The Dream versus Reality
Conclusion
SOURCES

Content: As the modern age arrived and cynicism began to rival idealism in the national mindset, the dark lining of the American dream loomed large in twentieth-century literature. Small-Town Life
Just after the beginning of the twentieth century, one widely accepted literary vision of the American dream involved life in a small, tightly knit community where residents were free from secrets and ill will. This idealized vision of a perfect American town, far removed from the tumult of the rest of the world, became a symbol for how the United States viewed itself in the larger community of the world. The reality of American small-town life may not have matched this vision very closely, but it was not until just prior to World War I that American writers began to explore this discrepancy in a meaningful way. Edgar Lee Masters, in his poetry collection Spoon River Anthology (1915), employs an ingenious technique for stripping away the rigid customs and traditions of American small-town life: Each poem is narrated from beyond the grave by a resident of the local Spoon River cemetery. These narrators are free to speak the truth about their own dreams and habits, and to expose the ways in which their seemingly idyllic town falls short of the idealized American dream. In "Doc Hill," the town caregiver admits he worked long hours because "My wife hated me, my son went to the dogs." In " Margaret Fuller Slack," the mother of eight recalls that, though she wanted to be a writer, her choices were "celibacy, matrimony or unchastity," and concludes, "Sex is the curse of life!" In "Abel Melveny," an apparently wealthy man laments the things he bought but never needed or used and sees himself "as a good machine / That Life had never used."