The Role of Automobiles in American Prose Fiction in the 1920s and 1930s

Automobiles in the literature of the United States of America in the 1920s and 1930s were an important motif, because in that time prospered the production of cars. Henry Ford with his T-model starts to develop a new technology, that is car producing. “The auto-industry became a ‘desiring machine’ within a society constructed as ‘deplacements and metamorphoses of energy that never stops decomposing and recomposing sub-units’” (Mottram 60). In prose fiction several American writers used the motif of automobiles either as a symbol or a background device introducing the environment or the characters. In my thesis I am going to analyze F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, Dodsworth and Babbitt, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath from this specific perspective. All of these works deal with automobiles as symbols, but in different aspects. I find these works the most useful novels to introduce the lifestyle of the era through the symbols of automobiles. Novels have the advantages in describing a decade that they can show the main features of the years widely. These pieces of prose fiction help the reader to get closer to the characteristics of the era.régi képzésangol nyelv és irodalom szakos tanár (távoktatás