Modernist

A broadly defined multinational cultural movement (or series of movements) that took hold in the late 19th century as a re-evaluation of the assumptions and aesthetic values of artistic predecessors.

Charles Henri Ford was a poet, an editor, a novelist, an artist, and a cultural catalyst whose career spanned much of 20th-century modernism. Ford claimed inspiration from filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist...

Poet and Harlem Renaissance–era editor Kathleen Tankersley Young was born in rural West Texas on August 15, 1902. She subsequently gave her birthplace as Cincinnati (April 15, 1903) and New York City (1905...

English poet David Gascoyne grew up in England and Scotland, and he lived in Paris in the early 1930s. His poetry underwent several major changes during his long career. At first an Imagist, then a dedicated...

Traveling often throughout his long and productive life, Henry James wrote fiction and travel literature about Americans in Europe and Europeans in America during the great epoch of transatlantic tourism and...

A poet, playwright, lawyer, and statesman, Archibald MacLeish’s roots were firmly planted in both the new and the old worlds. His father, the son of a poor shopkeeper in Glasgow, Scotland, was born in 1837...

A distinguished poet, novelist, critic, and teacher, Robert Penn Warren won virtually every major award given to writers in the United States and was the only person to receive a Pulitzer Prize in both fiction...

Robinson Jeffers was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. The son of Presbyterian minister and Biblical scholar, Dr. William Hamilton Jeffers, as a boy Jeffers was thoroughly trained in the Bible and classical...

David Jones was a poet and graphic artist. He is best known for his long narrative poems In Parenthesis (1937) and The Anathemata (1952), and for his engravings and paintings, which have won many awards. While...

The son of a Chicago attorney, Kenneth Flexner Fearing was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois, and he attended public schools. He then studied at the University of Wisconsin, where he earned a BA in 1924...

Laura Riding, later known as Laura (Riding) Jackson, was born in New York City and studied at Cornell University. She “was still in her thirties when she published her 477-page Collected Poems in 1938,” reported...

Poet Carl Sandburg was born into a poor family in Galesburg, Illinois. In his youth, he worked many odd jobs before serving in the 6th Illinois Infantry in Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War. He studied...

Félix Rubén García Sarmiento was born in Metapa, Nicaragua. A poet, journalist, and diplomat, Darío is considered the father of Modernismo, the Spanish language literary and cultural movement that gained sway...

John Gillespie Magee Jr. was born in Shanghai, China to missionary parents. His father was American and his mother was British; Magee moved to England in the early 1930s to attend St. Clare’s and then Rugby...

Poet and composer Ivor Bertie Gurney was born in Gloucester, England. Though his father was a tailor, Gurney’s godfather was Alfred Hunter Cheesman, a local vicar and bachelor who encouraged him in his artistic...

Samuel Greenberg was born in Vienna, Austria in 1893. He came to New York when he was seven and lived, first in poverty and then in a series of charity hospitals, on the Lower East Side. Greenberg died on ...

Cecil Day-Lewis has two contrasting claims on our attention. The first is as an archetypal poet of the 1930s, the first-born, last-named member of the Auden/Spender/Day-Lewis triad, and the only one of those...

Born Ford Hermann Hueffer in Surrey, England, Ford Madox Ford was a prolific poet, novelist, editor, and critic. The grandson of Ford Madox Brown, the painter, and a student of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina...

Early Modernist poet, novelist, and editor Alfred Kreymborg was born in New York City, the son of a cigar-store owner. A master chess player by age ten, he also played mandolin and piano before turning his...