Modernism:
The large cultural wave of Modernism, which gradually emerged in Europe and the United States in the early years of the 20th century, expressed a sense of modern life through art as a sharp break from the past, as awell as from Western civilization´s classical traditions. Modern life seemed radically different from traditional life -–more scientific, faster, more technological, and more mechanized. Modernism embraced these changes.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899 – 1961):
Like Fitzgerald, Dreiser, and many other fine novelists of the 20th century Hemingway came from the U.S. Midwest. Born in Illinois, Hemingway spent childhood vacations in Michigan on hunting and fishing trips. He volunteered for an ambulance unit in France during World WarI., but was wounded and hospitalized for six months. After the war as a war correspondent based in Paris he met expatriate American writers Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Stein, in particular, influenced his spare style. After his novel The Sun Also Rises brought him fame, he covered the Spanish Civil War, World War II., and the fighting in China in 1940s. Hunting and sport fishing activities inspired some of his best work. The Old Man and the Sea a short poetic novel about a poor, old fisherman who heroically catches a huge fish devoured by sharks, won him the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in 1954. Hemingway is arguably the most popular American novelist of this century. His simple style makes his novels easy to comprehend and they are often set in exotic surroundings. A believer in the cult of experience, Hemingway often involved his characters in dangerous situations in order to reveal their inner natures; in his later works, the danger sometimes becomes an occasion for masculine assertion. He wrote of war, death, and the lost generation of cynical survivors. His characters are not dreamers, but tough bullfighters, soldiers and athletes. If intellectual, they are deeply scarred and disillusioned.

Seventh chapter – American poetry since 1945: the anti-tradition.

It is not hard to find historical causes for this disassociated sensibility in the United States. World War II. itself, the rise of anonymity and consumerism in a mass urban society, the protest movements of the 1960s, the decade-long Vietnam conflict, the Cold War, enviromental threats – the catalog of shocks to American culture is long and varied. The change that has most transformed American society, however, ha been the rise of the mass media and mass culture. American poetry has been directly influenced by mass media and electronic technology.
Experimental poetry:
Experimental poetry was inspired by jazz and abstract expressionist painting.