Between the two world wars, serious novelists and playwrights(剧作家) were read and appreciated mainly by people from middle and upperclass backgrounds, for these people had money and this gave them opportunities for education and leisure which were beyond the reach of the poorer classes. For the same reason, the writers tended to come from the same kind of background, although there were many exceptions. The novelist, D. H. Lawrence, for example, was the son of a miner. But Lawrence’s books were bought and read by middle-class readers, and the language which he used was literary, rather than popular.
Lawrence, like other writers of the 1920s and 1930s—Aldous Huxley, H. G. Wells, and the older men, George Bernard Shaw and John Galsworthy—was presenting his public with his own view of life. He was hoping to persuade his readers. to think like himself. Many of the serious writers of the period were concerned with social and political problems. Their plays and novels were full of arguments in favor of social reforms. They made amusing and often bitter comments on the injustices and absurdities (荒唐) of life—especially middle-class life. Some novelists gave horrible warnings about the kind of future that mankind might have to face. Huxley’s amusing Brave New World and Orwell’s frightening Nine Eight- y-four (written in the 1940s) are still taken very seriously by many young people today.
Other writers, like Virginia Woolf and the Irishman, James Joyce, were more interested in thoughts and feelings than in social life, and they expressed their thoughts in a language which was sometimes extremely difficult to understand. At the same time there were plenty of novelists and playwrights whose only aim was to excite, to amuse and to move to tears! Not surprisingly, people tended to divide writers into two kinds—serious, or intellectual, and light, or non-intellectual.
Most of the rich people used to appreciate ______.