Why did Faulkner and Hemingway endlessly write horror stories? Surely, there was fun and beauty, humor and love in their lives. Would that not have been considered "serious" writing?

I grew up in Barnesboro, Pennsylvania, infinitely less prosperous than Oak Park, Illinois; could not have been less dreary, beautiful, numbing, tragic than Oxford, Mississippi. It was not a horror growing up in Barnesboro.

Kipling grew up in Raj India. Gonna go out on a limb here and assert that there was more ugliness, brutality, injustice that he saw as a child than Faulkner and Papa saw in their whole lives combined. Serious writer Kipling, no? Yet, Kipling wrote Kim.

Generational? Kipling was one older. Was Hemingway's generation really so "lost?" Faulkner was a contemporary. Faulkner wasn't of a "lost generation."

Cultural, American vs British? I don't know.

Now I'm reading The Great Gatsby. Light as cotten candy. Not a "serious" work. Not in the same league as The Sound and the Fury or A Farewell to Arms. Fitzgerald a contemporary of Faulkner and Hemingway and an American.

I don't know why Faulkner and Hemingway, the best American writers of the 20th century, only wrote horrors.