In the short story, “The Near and the Far,” modernism rears its head on more than one occasion. My interpretation of the story is perhaps a little askew of most, but I chose to see the engineer as the American people and the woman with her perfect house the “American Dream.” The modernists represented a culture of writers disillusioned with traditional American values and dreams. The engineer spent his prime (equivalent to the youth of …showed first 75 words of 317 total…

…showed last 75 words of 317 total…to the American Dream than any generation before. Home ownership was way up, debt down, and the United States was the strongest nation on the Earth. By the middle of the 1930’s, these same Americans were faced with a terrible situation that got worse as the shadow of war loomed from across the oceans. Even as they had been closer to attaining Utopia, in the American sense, they were now further than any before them.