Paralleling the defiant creativity of Harlem, other artists and intellectuals of the 1920s raised voices of dissent. Some had endured firsthand the shock of World War I, an experience so searing that American writer Gertrude Stein dubbed those who survived it the Lost Generation. Novelist John Dos Passos railed at the obscenity of “Mr. Wilson’s war” in The Three Soldiers (1921). Ernest Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) portrayed war’s futility and dehumanizing consequences.

Other writers also explored the dark side of the human psyche. In such dramas as Desire Under the Elms (1924), playwright Eugene O’Neill depicted characters driven by raw, ungovernable sexual impulses. O’Neill first made his mark with The Emperor Jones (1920), a popular Broadway drama about a black dictator driven from power by his people. Appealing to Americans’ fascination with Haiti, the play offered an ambiguous message: its black protagonist was played not by the customary white actors made up in blackface, but by African Americans who won acclaim for their performances. W. E. B. Du Bois called it “a splendid tragedy.” But others were dissatisfied with the play’s primitivism; one actor who played Emperor Jones altered the script to omit offensive racial epithets. The white crowds who made The Emperor Jones a hit, like those who flocked to Harlem’s jazz clubs, indulged a problematic fascination with “primitive” sexuality.

In a decade of conflict between traditional and modern worldviews, many writers exposed what they saw as the hypocrisy of small-town and rural life (American Voices). The most savage critic of conformity was Sinclair Lewis, whose novel Babbitt (1922) depicted the disillusionment of an ordinary small-town salesman. Babbitt was widely denounced as un-American; Elmer Gantry (1927), a satire about a greedy evangelical minister on the make, provoked even greater outrage. But critics found Lewis’s work superb, and in 1930 he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Even more famous was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), which offered a scathing indictment of Americans’ mindless pursuit of pleasure and material wealth.