In the United States, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) are surprisingly complete embodiments of the tragic form, written as they were at a time of booming American optimism, materialistic expansion, and sentimentalism in fiction—and no tragic theatre whatever. In The Scarlet Letter, a story of adultery set in colonial New England, the heroine’s sense of sin is incomplete; her spirited individualism insists (as she tells her lover) that “what we did had a consecration of its own.” The resulting conflict in her heart and mind is never resolved, and, although it does not destroy her, she lives out her life in gray and tragic isolation. Melville said that he was encouraged by Hawthorne’s exploration of “a certain tragic phase of humanity,” by his deep broodings and by the “blackness of darkness” in him, to proceed with similar explorations of his own in Moby Dick, which he dedicated to Hawthorne. Its protagonist, Captain Ahab, represents a return to what Melville called (defending Ahab’s status as tragic hero) a “mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies,” whose “ponderous heart,” “globular brain,” and “nervous lofty language” prove that even an old Nantucket sea captain can take his place with kings and princes of the ancient drama. Shakespearean echoes abound in the novel; some of its chapters are written in dramatic form. Its theme and central figure, reminiscent of Job and Lear in their search for justice and of Oedipus in his search for the truth, all show what Melville might have been—a great tragic dramatist had there been a tragic theatre in America.

Some American novelists of the 20th century carried on, however partially, the tragic tradition. Theodore Dreiser’s American Tragedy (1925) is typical of the naturalistic novel, which is also represented by the work of Stephen Crane, James T. Farrell, and John Steinbeck. Though showing great sensitivity to environmental or sociological evils, such works fail to embody the high conception of character (as Melville describes it above) and are concerned mainly with externals, or reportage. The protagonists are generally “good” (or weak) and beaten down by society. The novels of Henry James, which span the period from 1876 to 1904, are concerned with what has been called the tragedy of manners. The society James projects is sophisticated, subtle, and sinister. The innocent and the good are destroyed, like Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove (1902), who in the end “turns her face to the wall” and dies but in her death brings new vision and new values to those whose betrayals had driven her to her death.

The trend in American fiction, as in the drama, continued in the 20th century toward the pathos of the victim—the somehow inadequate, the sometimes insignificant figure destroyed by such vastly unequal forces that the struggle is scarcely significant. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby in his novel The Great Gatsby (1925) is betrayed by his own meretricious dream, nurtured by a meretricious society. The hero of Ernest Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms (1929), disillusioned by war, makes a separate peace, deserts, and joins his beloved in neutral Switzerland. When she dies in childbirth, he sees it as still another example of how “they”—society, the politicians who run the war, or the mysterious forces that destroyed Catherine—get you in the end. The tone is lyric and pathetic rather than tragic (though Hemingway called the novel his Romeo and Juliet). Grief turns the hero away from, rather than toward, a deeper examination of life.

Only the novels of William Faulkner, in their range and depth and in their powerful assault on the basic tragic themes, recall unmistakably the values of the tragic tradition. His “saga of the South,” as recounted in a series of novels (notably Sartoris, 1929; The Sound and the Fury, 1929; As I Lay Dying, 1930; Sanctuary, 1931; Light in August, 1932; Absalom, Absalom! 1936; Intruder in the Dust, 1948; Requiem for a Nun, 1951), incorporates some 300 years of Southern history. At first regarded as a mere exploiter of decadence, he can now be seen as gradually working beyond reportage and toward meaning. His sociology became more and more the “sin” of the South—the rape of the land, slavery, the catastrophe of the Civil War and its legacy of a cynical and devitalized materialism. Increasingly he saw the conflict as internal. The subject of art, Faulkner said in his 1949 Nobel Prize speech, is “the human heart in conflict with itself.” His insistence is on guilt as the evidence of man’s fate, and on the possibility of expiation as the assertion of human freedom. Compassion, endurance, and the capacity to learn are seen to be increasingly effective in his characters. In the veiled analogies to Christ as outcast and redeemer in Light in August and in the more explicit Christology of A Fable (1954), in the pastoral serenity following the anguish and horror in Light in August, and in the high comedy of the last scene of Intruder in the Dust, Faulkner puts into tragic fiction the belief he stated in his Nobel speech: “I decline to accept the end of man.”