In August 1914, World War I erupted in Europe.  This chapter surveys the causes and immediate effects of the war and discusses how the arts developed in its wake.

The assassination of Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist set off a course of events that dragged Europe into its most destructive war to date.  Locked into a well-armed, mutually hostile alliance system and goaded by belligerent nationalists, the Great Powers spun into hostilities that lasted four years and claimed millions of lives.  The Versailles Treaty created resentment among both the victors and defeated, contributing to the subsequent rise of Fascism in Italy and Germany.  Unable to cope with the war, the Russian monarchy fell to a liberal government, which was itself overthrown by Lenin's Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution.  During the ensuing civil war, the Bolsheviks fought off tsarist forces and their foreign allies, establishing the repressive Soviet state.

The war created profound disillusionment with Western society and culture.  Several soldier-writers conveyed their experience of war.  A few, such as Brooke, glorified combat, but most—including Owen, Barbusse, Remarque, and Hemingway—depicted the brutality of modern warfare, the blindness of the leaders who pursued it, and plight of the soldiers who fought its battles.  Though a noncombatant, Mann acutely diagnosed the doubts about European culture that the war seemed to confirm.  Stein defined the "Lost Generation" of post-war American expatriates, and Hemingway became its leading voice, expressing its disdain for traditional values and aimless search for meaning.

During the "Roaring Twenties," American novelists reacted to the culture of anxiety, materialism, and hedonistic enjoyment provoked by the war.  Wharton responded to post-war impatience with social convention by depicting similar disquiet among the wealthy of old New York.  Lewis examined traditional values to which many Americans clung after the war, satirizing small-town life, the American business ethos, and religious hypocrisy.  Fitzgerald took up the spiritual emptiness of post-war opulence, exposing the cynicism inside the American Dream.

Modernist experimentation continued as writers developed new forms of expressionism.  Drawing upon obscure cultural materials, Eliot's fragmented poems suggest the physical decay, moral decline, and spiritual desolation of post-war Western culture.  Yeats cultivated a prophetic voice in his poetry, envisioning apocalyptic transformation of the world.  Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels often employ techniques such as interior monologue to depict his characters' experience of cultural change in the American South.  O'Neill's plays use expressionist devices to represent the power of the collective unconscious and human costs of modern industrialism and urban life.

Stimulated by the "Great Migration" to northern cities, the Harlem Renaissance nourished many prominent African American artists and intellectuals.  Although black Americans were burdened by a "double-consciousness" (DuBois), many were emerging in Harlem and other communities as self-possessed "New Negro[s]" (Locke).  In a great flowering of verse and prose, writers including Toomer, Johnson, Mackay, Bontemps, Cullen, and Hughes represented the daily lives, frustrations, and triumphs of black people in both the rural South and urban North.

After WW1, artists explored new approaches to abstraction and expressionism.  German artists—including Dix, Beckmann, Grosz, and Kollwitz—used dark, often violent imagery to depict the cruelty and despair of the post-war world.  Regarding life as meaninglessness, the Dadaists offered objects that nihilistically rejected familiar artistic values.  Influenced by Freud and Dadaism, the Surrealists plumbed the unconscious for truths beyond reason, producing works that ranged from expressionist distortions of reality to whimsical abstraction.  With his colleagues in De Stijl, Mondrian cultivated the pure abstraction of flat surfaces, straight lines, and primary colors to depict the universal reality behind appearances.  Breaking with the style of Rodin, sculptors of this period explored new directions.  Like Mondrian's paintings, Brancusi's sculptures attempted to represent fundamental essences through rigorous abstraction.  Initially a Surrealist, Giacometti later turned to more naturalistic representation, emphasizing slender, elongated human forms.  Influenced by non-Western art and Surrealism, Moore created sensuously modeled yet increasingly abstract sculptures.

During this period, America made some of its greatest contributions to Western music.  Notable for its syncopated rhythms, ragtime was composed mainly by African-American pianists such as Scott Joplin, who wrote several of the most enduring rags.  Exemplified by the songs of Bessie Smith and other singers, blues was a vocal and instrumental style featuring improvised solos and distinctive "blue note" phrasing of repeated major chords.  Incorporating improvisation and call-and-response, jazz also combined elements from blues, ragtime, and band music.  Early jazz included the Dixieland of Morton and Armstrong, and the riff-based swing pioneered by Ellington and other arrangers.  George Gershwin combined jazz and classical idioms in his songs, instrumental works, and Broadway scores.

Despite some lingering confidence in progress, on the eve of World War I, many Europeans doubted the future of Western civilization.  The war turned that doubt into disillusion, convincing many that reason and morality were shattered, that scientific progress meant more efficient carnage, and that liberalism was naďve.  In the face of this crisis, many artists, intellectuals, and veterans hoped to prevent another such cataclysm by vigorously endorsing democratic and socialist ideals.  However, others embraced militarism and totalitarian ideologies as the only viable responses to a meaningless, chaotic world.  Brutal dictatorships rose in Germany, Italy, and Russia.  With a powerful model of total war to emulate, these would mobilize their national resources with unprecedented efficiency, pursuing a war that nearly eradicated democracy from Europe.