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LITERATURE

Few events have had a more immediate impact on the cultural life of the United States than the Great Depression. When the stock market crashed in October 1929, American literature was in the closing days of a now legendary renaissance, a period in which some of the most significant writers of the twentieth century—T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, and Robert Frost, to name but a few—first came to prominence. Yet, despite the fact that many of these figures expressed sincere hostility toward the commercial values prevalent in the culture of their day, the writers of the 1920s were deeply dependent on the booming economy of the decade, often for their subject matter as well as for material support. The economic upheaval of the thirties changed that situation fundamentally. Not only did the stagnant economy shake up the publishing industry, leading to important, long-term changes in the literary profession, widespread and persistent suffering forced American writers to question their basic assumptions about the United States and its cultural and political values and brought new ideas and voices to the fore. In the words of the prominent critic Edmund Wilson, "the economic crisis" had been "accompanied by a literary one." As a result, the Great Depression gave rise to a new cohort of important American writers. John Dos Passos, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and Richard Wright all did their most important writing in the thirties. Oftentimes their work spoke directly to the social and political conflicts that had been created by the era's economic catastrophe.

LITERATURE AND POLITICS

Perhaps the most evident and controversial feature of Depression-era writing was the self-conscious politicization of literature. For many American writers, as Alfred Kazin explained at the time, the Depression was "an education in shock." Struggling to come to grips with the stagnation and confusion they saw throughout American society, many assumed that capitalism and liberal democracy had not merely suffered setbacks, but had been proven conclusive failures. Many looked to communism or socialism for the promise of a better world, and, hoping to make art more than a diversion or a refuge, many writers sought to make their work a useful tool for improving society. In the words of the radical writer Joseph Freeman, they strove to overcome "the dichotomy between poetry and politics," so that "art and life" might be "fused."

One consequence of that politicization was that throughout the thirties the American literary world was divided by fierce battles between contending factions on the left and by antagonistic theories of literature. At the extreme end of the spectrum stood writers associated with the Communist Party who, advocating a controversial program of "proletarian literature," demanded that art become "a class weapon." Looking to the Soviet Union for the model of a rationally planned society, these writers celebrated the resilience of the working class and extolled the solidarity, enlightenment, and "revolutionary élan" promised by communism. In novels such as Michael Gold's Jews without Money and Clara Weatherwax's Marching! Marching!, or in plays like Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty, they described a capitalist world that was exploitative, unjust, and corrupt, and told stories of how their long-suffering protagonists came to see the truth and join the struggle. Their underlying vision was always revolutionary, and their stories typically ended with the promise of cataclysm and violent transformation. "O workers' Revolution," Gold's novel concludes, "You will destroy the East Side when you come, and build there a garden for the human spirit."

Despite the fervor of its proponents, however, the movement for "proletarian" literature never took deep hold in American letters. It was most successful in the field of drama, where the revolutionary demand for immediacy and action revitalized the theater and nurtured such writers as Odets and directors as Harold Clurman, whose influence would be felt long after the 1930s ended. Proletarian poetry, on the other hand, and, in particular, proletarian fiction, where the movement staked its greatest hopes, were far less successful. With the exception of Jews without Money, which went through eleven printings when it was published in 1930, very few proletarian novels found a wide readership, and most lacked the genuine power and eloquence of Gold's often nostalgic account of growing up in the tenements of New York's Lower East Side. The best-selling novels of the thirties—historical romances like Hervey Allen's Anthony Adverse and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with The Wind—dealt with the Depression in a different way, by allowing readers to escape into another time, where spunky individuals triumphed over great adversity. Proletarian writers, who preferred to stress the significance of class struggle, never reached a popular audience. Nor were they successful with sophisticated readers, who were often offended by the dogmatic simplicity of novels that tended to see workers as inherently good and the bourgeoisie as evil. After 1935, proletarian literature died a quick death, the victim of both Communist Party policy (which, following the directives of the Soviet Comintern, turned away from advocating revolutionary struggle and toward supporting a "Popular Front" of communists, socialists, and liberals against fascism) and the success of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Radical writers now spoke not of proletarian, but of "people's literature," and claimed that the central issue of the day was not class struggle, but the contest between fascism and democracy.

Yet, though a small and short-lived phenomenon, the proletarian movement exercised disproportionate influence over the literature of the 1930s because radical writers spoke with energy and conviction when so many of their peers were confused. For many writers, the misery of the Depression made literature seem a useless luxury. Defenders of "proletarian" literature like Gold—who was a harshly polemical critic as well as a novelist—provided an emphatic answer to this anxiety. They repudiated the subtlety and literary sophistication that characterized much of American writing in the 1920s and demanded instead that literature deal "with the real conflicts of men and women." Almost regardless of their political allegiance, American writers tended to share that conviction and to be impressed by the commitment of the era's radicals. Many worried that in the pursuit of technical excellence, American literature had become too preoccupied with aesthetic problems and too narrowly focused on the concerns of a small and highly privileged segment of society. Indeed, shaken by the Depression and increasingly troubled over the course of the decade by the growing threat of fascism in Europe, many writers who had achieved renown during the 1920s adopted left-leaning political views and shifted their work to follow suit. In Tender is the Night, for example, F. Scott Fitzgerald continued to write about characters who longed for glamour and wealth, but he now saw their world less as the romantic vision he described in The Great Gatsby and more as a crumbling edifice built atop a structure of economic exploitation. Similarly, in his novel about the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway turned from the individual alienation he had portrayed in such "lost generation" novels as The Sun Also Rises and now celebrated his hero's commitment to "absolute brotherhood" in the struggle against fascism. Many of their contemporaries followed a similar path. Even Wallace Stevens, perhaps the most aristocratic and purely aesthetic writer of his generation, declared in 1935 that he hoped his poetry was "heading left."

The proletarian movement also helped inspire a widespread interest in the literature of social protest by writers who were less radical or less doctrinaire than the artists associated with the Communist Party. Among the most impressive literary achievements of the decade, for example, was John Dos Passos's trilogy of novels, U.S.A. Dos Passos's massive effort to depict the whole of American civilization was far more complex and politically ambiguous than any example of proletarian literature, but it shared the proletarian writers' sense that American society had been profoundly damaged by capitalism and harshly divided along class lines. "They have the dollars the guns the armed forces the power plants," Dos Passos charged with grim satisfaction, "all right we are two nations." Something similar was true of the most explosive work of the decade, Richard Wright's bestselling novel Native Son, which sold 215,000 copies in the first three weeks after it was published and went on to become an extraordinary best seller. Wright's portrait of the simmering Black anger exemplified by his protagonist Bigger Thomas deliberately rejected Communist Party orthodoxy in favor of Bigger's dreams of "personal" freedom and self-assertion. But Wright's career had been nurtured invaluably by the proletarian movement, and his work reflected genuine sympathy for the Marxian vision of interracial, working-class solidarity. In his most utopian moments, Bigger imagines himself "standing in the midst of a crowd of men, white men and black men and all men" as "the sun's rays melted away the many differences, the colors, the clothes, and drew what was common and good upward toward the sun."

THE PEOPLE, YES

Other prominent writers sought to address "the real conflicts of men and women" in still more direct ways, embracing a documentary realist style of writing that aimed to transmit true reports of Depression conditions. The atmosphere of crisis had created a great demand for reliable information about the suffering and the political attitudes of ordinary Americans, and throughout the decade a new genre of non-fictional literature flourished in which writers sought to answer that need by searching out representatives of the figure Franklin Delano Roosevelt had famously called "the forgotten man." In such works as Sherwood Anderson's Puzzled America, Louis Adamic's My America, and James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, writers traveled the nation's back roads and hinterlands and reported to their readers about the neglected, real people they had found there.

Over the course of the 1930s, the desire to search out, to celebrate, and sometimes to sentimentalize ordinary people became an ever more prevalent feature of American literature. It was encouraged by the Popular Front and, more importantly, by the New Deal, which not only celebrated the common man, but which, through the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), paid writers to chronicle the nation's local cultures and regional differences. But the widespread literary yearning to connect with ordinary people and, as Michael Gold put it, plant "roots in something real," also reflected a more deep-seated reaction to the Depression. Believing that economic collapse had revealed the destructiveness of America's competitive society and the failure—or, still worse, the parasitism—of the nation's elite, many writers looked to plebian Americans for the vitality and good will that seemed otherwise absent from the national culture. Carl Sandburg brought this trend to its apotheosis when he published his much-loved book of poems The People, Yes in 1936. Likewise, believing that the Depression had revealed the emptiness and disorganization of urban civilization, many other writers searched for visions of deep-rooted, meaningful ways of life and found them in the nation's folkways and rural communities.

That search was evident in many places during the thirties, as writers eagerly sought out diverse folk cultures across the various regions of the nation. It was apparent, for example, in a new interest in stories by and about ethnic Americans, as such writers as James T. Farrell, Pietro DiDonato, Henry Roth, and William Saroyan chronicled the distinctive cultures of the nation's immigrant communities and their struggles to enter the American mainstream. It was still more evident in the new vogue for Southern literature. In his great novels of the 1930s—As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, and Light in August—William Faulkner created the era's most complex and tragically divided portrait of the South's unique cultural inheritance. But many other writers of the moment offered less ambivalent accounts. Among them was the movement of "Agrarian" writers led by Allan Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren. Echoing the decade's left-wing writers, the Agrarians denounced America's industrial civilization, but against it they advocated a highly conservative vision of an "organic" society that they believed survived in Southern culture. Zora Neale Hurston's fiction focused on the exuberant vitality that Hurston perceived in the region's Black peasantry, but especially in her great novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston also praised the distinctive folkways and communal life that persisted in the rural South. So, too, in varying degrees did a whole crop of new Southern writers, including James Agee, Carson McCullers, Erskine Caldwell, and, not least significantly, Margaret Mitchell.

The celebration of folk culture and of popular resilience took on its most emphatic form, however, in John Steinbeck's hugely successful novel The Grapes of Wrath, which is in many ways the most representative of American literary works from the 1930s. Telling the epic tale of the "Okie" migration from the dust bowl of the southwest to southern California, The Grapes of Wrath is a protest novel like Dos Passos's U.S.A. and Wright's Native Son. It indicts the callousness of a social system that rendered millions homeless and that left hungry people to starve while farmers who could not sell their crops were forced to destroy them. And, at its ideological center, in a portrait of a government camp that offers Steinbeck's protagonists a brief respite in their hopeless search for home and work, it provided a defense of the New Deal programs that sought to address the nation's farm crisis. But the true heart of the novel lies in its stirring vision of the goodness and brotherhood among ordinary people struggling to survive. As Steinbeck's Ma Joad says in one of the novel's most celebrated lines, "We're the people—we go on."

A PORTRAIT OF AMERICA

In the long run, the most important achievement of American literature during the Great Depression may have been the way works by Steinbeck and Wright, Faulkner and Hurston, Gold and Dos Passos combined to create what the New Deal administrator Harry Hopkins called, in his praise of the Writers Project, a new "portrait of America." Over the course of the twentieth century, the United States had become an increasingly complex and culturally diverse society. But it was not until the 1930s that American literature began to reflect and, indeed, to glory in that diversity. In fact, one of the most significant literary consequences of the Great Depression was the way the atmosphere of crisis and, more importantly, the federal funding for the arts first provided by the New Deal, brought to prominence many new authors, from previously neglected segments of the population. During the 1930s, those writers contributed to the creation of a new, populist vision of America as, at its best, a multiethnic and fraternal society. But even after the Depression had passed and that populist vision had disappeared along with it, American literature would remain the broad based and diverse field that it had only first become in the thirties.

See Also: ADAMIC, LOUIS; AGEE, JAMES; CALDWELL, ERSKINE; COMMUNIST PARTY; DOS PASSOS, JOHN; EVANS, WALKER; FAULKNER, WILLIAM; GONE WITH THE WIND; GRAPES OF WRATH, THE; HURSTON, ZORA NEALE; POETRY; POPULAR FRONT; SOCIALIST PARTY; STEINBECK, JOHN.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Bloom, James D. Left Letters: The Culture Wars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman. 1992.

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. 1996.

Filreis, Alan. Modernism from Left to Right: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, and Literary Radicalism. 1994.

Foley, Barbara. Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U. S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941. 1993.

Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature. 1942.

Klein, Marcus. Foreigners: The Making of American Literature, 1900–1940. 1982.

Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945. 1989.

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Stott, William. Documentary Expression and Thirties America. 1973.

Szalay, Michael. New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State. 2000.

SEAN MCCANN