Literature during the 1930’s contained energy and purpose and helped Americans deal with the multiple crises of the Great Depression. It documented the problems of poverty, unemployment, and hunger across the country, while giving readers glimpses of the courage and camaraderie to help them pull through tough economic times.

The decade of the 1930’s is set off by the economic crash of 1929 and the beginning U.S. involvement in World War II in 1941. Its bookends, the boom years of the Jazz Age and the tense war and postwar years—help to highlight the significant differences between the literatures of the disparate eras. The poetry, fiction, and drama of the 1930’s reflected the issues of the Great Depression with a focus on social, economic, and political issues.

The Activist Commitment

The novelists who created innovative styles in the 1920’s, such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, continued to publish during the 1930’s, but their work either reflected the changes in the atmosphere of the Depression or appeared less important. Fitzgerald never matched the success of The Great Gatsby (1925), and he died just as the 1930’s ended. He was never satisfied with Tender Is the Night (1934), which critic Edmund Wilson reedited after his death, and The Last Tycoon (1941) was left unfinished but revealed a departure in subject matter, focusing on the power structure of Hollywood. Hemingway’s best novel of the period was For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a romantic story of the Spanish Civil War that revealed the increasing literary interest during this period in the international rise of fascism. Of major American writers who started during the 1920’s, only Faulkner did his best work during the 1930’s; novels he wrote in the decade included Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), but his fiction seemed out of touch with the main issues of American fiction. By 1944, Faulkner was out of print in the United States, and he reemerged only when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950. Like Nathanael West, who wrote Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939), Faulkner was one of the writers of the 1930’s who had to wait for a different cultural climate in which to be rediscovered.

Reflected across the literary spectrum, from poetry and theater to fiction and nonfiction, the dominant mood of the 1930’s was an awareness of pressing social and economic issues and a political commitment to address these massive problems in the United States. The enormity of the Great Depression struck many writers at once: In 1932, when one of four American workers was unemployed, fifty-two leading writers and intellectuals—including Malcolm Cowley, John Dos Passos, Langston Hughes, Lincoln Steffens, and Wilson—signed an open letter supporting the Communist Party USA candidate for president of the United States. From the perspective of these writers, American capitalism was near collapse, and they found solutions in the ideas of the political and literary left. One of those ideas was that writers should address the social and economic problems of the United States, and in numerous articles and editorials, not only in the Marxist New Masses but also in liberal magazines such as The Nation and The New Republic, reviewers and critics urged novelists and poets to examine and write about the multiple problems of the United States.

The literary result of this focus was a newfound interest in social and economic subjects. Writers such as Wilson, who wrote The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump (1932), and Sherwood Anderson, who wrote Puzzled America (1935), traveled back and forth across the country, documenting how Americans were surviving or not during the early years of the Depression. This documentary journalism led writers to enlist photographers to help illustrate the multiple problems: Erskine Caldwell joined with photographer Margaret Bourke-White in You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), Archibald MacLeish wrote a prose-poem that accompanied Farm Security Administration photographs in Land of the Free (1938), Paul Schuster Taylor and Dorothea Lange teamed up in An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion in the Thirties (1939), and James Agee and Walker Evans published the classic of this genre in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a study of three Alabama tenant-farm families. This documentary impulse can be seen in the dozens of books the Federal Writers’ Project produced, such as These Are Our Lives (1939)—a collection of interviews of residents in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia—or the American Guide series to the forty-eight states.

This energy spilled over into poetry and theater during the 1930’s as well. Modernist Anglo-American writers of the poetic renaissance of 1910 to 1930 continued to work through the 1930’s, but they seemed to be increasingly irrelevant to what was happening in the United States; this was especially true of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, who lived permanently in Europe. Popular older poets included Robert Frost (A Further Range [1937]) and Carl Sandburg (The People, Yes, [1936]), whose roughened voices seemed closer to the tone of the 1930’s. Closer still to the spirit of the decade were poets such as Joseph Kalar, Kenneth Patchen, Muriel Rukeyser, Kenneth Fearing, and Alfred Hayes, who rejected many of the modernist assumptions about poetry to face more directly the crises of the period. Langston Hughes’s poem “Goodbye Christ” (1932), for example, ends with the line, “Goodbye Christ, good morning Revolution!” Genevieve Taggard’s “Mill Town” (1936) concerns the death of a child by hunger, Kay Boyle’s “A Communication to Nancy Cunard” (1937) focuses on the famous Scottsboro case, and MacLeish’s Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller’s City (1933) celebrates American history.

The same trend was true in drama. While the giant of the American theater, Eugene O’Neill, continued to produce his dark plays, for example Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), a newer generation of playwrights emerged who dealt with the political and economic issues of the day. These included Clifford Odets, who wrote Waiting for Lefty (1935) about a labor strike; Marc Blitzstein, who wrote a labor “opera,” The Cradle Will Rock (1937); and Lillian Hellman, who wrote The Little Foxes (1939), about avarice and other evils. Collective ensembles, such as The Group Theatre, which produced works by Odets, Paul Green, and others, or the Federal Theatre Project, which put on hundreds of performances of plays, classic and modern, to eager audiences across the country, also played major roles in the 1930’s theater scene.

As in any period, other literary themes emerged as well. Like the screwball comedies Hollywood produced during the 1930’s, some American literature included escapist themes. The novel that led the best-seller lists in both 1936 and 1937 was Margaret Mitchell’s historical romance, Gone with the Wind (1936). One popular genre that emerged during the 1930’s and left a lasting mark was the hard-boiled detective novel, particularly as practiced by Dashiell Hammett, who wrote The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Thin Man (1932), and Raymond Chandler, who wrote The Big Sleep (1939) and Farewell, My Lovely (1940). In many ways, the “tough guy” tone of the detective novel fit perfectly into the harsh economic times of the Depression.

Proletarian Literature

In addition to actual economic conditions, the main catalyst for the social protest literature of the 1930’s was the Marxist literary criticism that emerged in the New Masses, Partisan Review, and other radical journals but increasingly in liberal journals such as The Nation and The New Republic as well. New Masses editor Mike Gold’s attack on popular novelist Thornton Wilder in The New Republic in 1930 represented dozens of articles and reviews he wrote in the first half of the decade that attacked bourgeois writers and called for a working-class literature. The literary criticism he espoused was refined and articulated in less strident tones by critics such as Granville Hicks and Joseph Freeman, whose An American Testament (1936) is also a first-rate memoir. By the mid-1930’s, a milder form of Marxist literary criticism was regularly written by left-leaning critics such as Cowley, Wilson, Newton Arvin, and others.

The call for proletarian literature resulted in a wealth of firsthand reports on actual social and economic conditions in the United States in the first years of the Depression. These included the 1932 Harlan Miners Speak: A Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields by a National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners that included Theodore Dreiser, Anderson, and Dos Passos. By 1934, a distinctive genre of “proletarian reportage” could be identified in the decade’s journalism: John L. Spivak’s “A Letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt,” from a fifteen year-old girl working in the cotton fields in California’s Imperial Valley; Joseph North’s “Taxi Strike”; Tillie Olsen’s “The Strike”; and Meridel Le Sueur’s “I Was Marching.” The landmark 1935 collection Proletarian Literature in the United States: An Anthology, edited by Hicks, Gold, and others, had a reportage section that included the pieces that appeared in the New Masses by Le Sueur, North, and Spivak and a literary-criticism section with essays by Gold, Cowley, Hicks, and others. The fiction in the anthology included selections from Gold, Dos Passos, and Lerner, while the poetry was written by Fearing, Gold, Hayes, Hughes, Kalar, Patchen, Rukeyser, Taggard, and Richard Wright.

The most distinctive literary movement of the 1930’s was the “proletarian novel,” a form that emerged in the early 1930’s in response to the calls by critics and editors for work covering the multiple social and economic problems of the Depression from working-class perspectives. If documentary reportage could look at these problems, leftist critics argued, fiction should as well. As just one example of this movement, six novels were written centering on a single 1929 textile-mill strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, including Anderson’s Beyond Desire(1932), Fielding Burke’s Call Home the Heart (1932), and Grace Lumpkin’s To Make My Bread (1932), all of which were published in 1932. Perhaps the best proletarian novel of this subgenre was Robert Cantwell’s The Land of Plenty (1934), about a strike in a coastal Washington wood-veneer factory. So many proletarian novels appeared in the early 1930’s, in fact, that literary historians have developed separate categories to describe them: in addition to strike novels, “bottom dog” novels were identified. Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited (1933) and Nelson Algren’s Somebody in Boots (1935) are probably the best examples of this subgenre about down-and-out victims of the Depression.

Two of the best proletarian novels of the decade appeared early: Gold’s Jews Without Money was published in 1930 and told the story of a young man growing up on the lower East Side of Manhattan. Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1935) was a similar story of a lower East Side childhood and had a far more complex and subtle structure and style than Gold’s. Perhaps the most lasting proletarian work of the early 1930’s was James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy, produced between 1932 and 1935, that included Young Lonigan (1932), The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934), and Judgment Day (1935). These books followed a young Irish American growing up in lower-class Chicago to his premature death at twenty-nine. Another noteworthy proletarian trilogy in the decade was written by Josephine Herbst. Pity Is Not Enough (1933), The Executioner Waits (1934), and Rope of Gold (1939) traced the lives of the Trexler family from the mid-nineteenth century up to the sit-down strikes of 1937.

The Social Realist Energy of 1930’s Fiction

The proletarian impulse can be seen in other fictional works of the 1930’s. Dos Passos’s trilogy U.S.A.—The Forty-second Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936)—constitutes a historical examination of social and economic forces in conflict, including unions and capitalists, in the first decades of the twentieth century. John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle (1936) was a strike novel set in the San Joaquin Valley; his classic The Grapes of Wrath (1939)—which showed the migration of the Joad family from their Oklahoma farm, from which they had been evicted, to their struggles in California’s farmland—clearly revealed the influence of the earlier proletarian novel. Wright, the most important African American writer of the 1930’s, wrote Uncle Tom’s Children(1938), which contained four novellas detailing the difficulties of poor African Americans in the rural South, and Native Son (1940), which showed the brutal conditions under which they lived in northern industrial cities such as Chicago. None of these later works was strictly “proletarian,” but they showed the influence of this literary movement. Like the social realist art of Ben Shahn, Jack Levine, Jacob Lawrence, and other painters, this fiction revealed a deeper social commitment than had been seen in American art and literature since the nineteenth century. Increasingly in the second half of the 1930’s, as conditions worsened in Europe with the rise of fascism, writers turned their attention from domestic to international subjects. Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) is only the best-known example of this impulse to examine issues in Europe. Others included Dalton Trumbo’s antiwar Johnny Got His Gun (1939) and Hellman’s antifascist The Watch on the Rhine (1941).

Impact

The literature of the 1930’s showed how fruitful and energizing the clash of literature and society could be for both writers and their work. In contrast to the often sterile and academic art and literature of the following two decades, the literary work of the 1930’s demonstrated just how valuable the confrontation with social and economic issues could be. The novels of Dos Passos, Steinbeck, and Wright and the plays of Odets and Hellman are filled with anger, compassion, and frustration, but they often reveal the United States in ways it had not been portrayed before.

The 1930’s was the first decade in which a significant amount of literature by women, black, and working-class writers appeared. The decade called for these “minority” voices, at the same time as it energized scores of others. Steinbeck, Odets, Wright, Farrell, and Dos Passos, among many artists, never again achieved the same level of success they did during the Great Depression. As a sign of the deep sense of concern and commitment of the decade, American writers got together, in a series of American Writers’ Congresses, beginning in 1935, to discuss literary and social issues of mutual interest; the 1930’s was the only decade in which this happened.

This positive spirit of the decade ended abruptly, however. World War II immediately absorbed most American energy, and after the war the Cold War culture began, in which the literary works of the 1930’s were denigrated and investigated as communist. The anticommunist hysteria of the 1950’s, in particular, questioned the whole decade of the 1930’s. Not until the 1960’s and after did the writers of the 1930’s began to emerge from the shadows, and critics and historians could honestly evaluate their accomplishments and recognize the true literary contributions.

Further Reading