One of my favorite American authors of the twentieth century is William Faulkner. (He was also Steinbeck's favorite author.) The Trauma of the Civil War Lives On in Faulkner’s Fiction. Suitable for another thread another time, but also an excellent illustrator of American history.

Through the ineffable, through his relentless drive to describe what cannot be said directly, Faulkner plunges us into the harrowing canyons of the nation’s past. Toni Morrison, his fellow Nobel laureate, wrote that she read Faulkner to “find out about this country and that artistic articulation of its past that was not available in history, which is what art and fiction can do but history sometimes refuses to do.” In spending relatively little time with the literary aspects of Faulkner’s novels — the astounding characterization, his brilliance with metaphor and his dazzling descriptions of perception and physicality — Gorra misses an opportunity to tell a fuller story of the sublime interplay of aesthetics and theme in Faulkner’s work. This is doubly unfortunate because Gorra writes so beautifully when he turns his attention to Faulkner’s artistry, as in this description of “Absalom, Absalom!”: “This prose has that same overheated fecundity, its modifiers piled recklessly, rank with too much meaning.”

Another favorite, whose oeuvre should have stopped at one novel, was Harper Lee, whose To Kill a Mockingbird flows much in the way Faulkner's does (though you don't have to figure out how to breathe to read her writing. The key is that Faulkner's work was written to be read out loud.) I mention this to make it clear that it isn't just men who wrote these great modernist novels.

To return to the Steinbeck topic, CSpan "Booknotes" featured the Life and Times of John Steinbeck in a 2002 program, filmed at the National Steinbeck Center. Writings of John Steinbeck starts out with my friend Louis Owens (mentioned back in the early posts of this thread). The entire two hour lecture can be listened to through the CSpan area. (Owen's literary examination of Steinbeck, also available through the Twane series mentioned above, is very accessible. Alas, Owens died later in the year after he participated in this program.)