AMERICAN

LITERATURE OF THE 1930s

POLITICS AND AESTHTICS IN

THE RED DECADE
Literature in the 1930s
 Developed under the giant shadow of the
Great Depression and the New Deal
reforms
 Not usually thought of as years of
exceptional creativity
 The most prominent development was the
development of “American proletarian art”

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American Proletarian Art
 Two terms which are quite often taken to be
mutually contradictory
 Seen as a failed venture of an undoubtedly
very troubled epoch
 Seen as doomed from the very beginning
 Attempted to place individualism of creation
in service to the social goals of a collectivist
ideology

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The Literature of the 1930s
 The ideal of collectivity, cooperation,
socialism or ‘solidarity’ was a
distinguishing feature of the writings of
many of the writers of that time
 What makes this literature a specifically
American phenomenon is the interaction of
gender and race in the works of most of the
“proletarian” writers

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Michael Gold (1893-1967)
 Real name: Itzok Isaac
Granich
 Changed it to Irwin
Granich when he started
publishing
 Finally remained in the
history of American
literature under the name
of Michael Gold.

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Jews without Money (1930)
 The first true achievement of the immigrant
autobiography in the USA
 One of the first to tell the story of the
immigrant experience in Manhattan with such
force and vividness
 A paradox: his chance of surviving as a writer
has come to depend much more on religion
and ethnicity that he abandoned than on his
politics and ideology
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Jews Without Money
 Read today because of the Jewish identity he
implicitly rejects at the end of the book and not
because of the Marxist identity he explicitly took
at the end of the book.
 He was the first to express the frustrations and
poverty of the immigrants from Eastern Europe
who flooded America at the turn of the century in
search of the American Dream of wealth and
happiness

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Jews Without Money
 Prefigured Clifford Odets’s proletarian play
Wating for Lefty (1935) and Henry Roth’s novel
Call It Sleep (1934)
 It is not about the thirties and did not emerge
from a thirties’ sensibility but it has seemed the
preeminent novel of the 1930s
 Published in February 1930 and by October the
same year it had gone into its eleventh print

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Jews Without Money
 The center of the book is Katie Gold, whose
persistent struggle to survive with dignity and
generosity of spirit stands as a paradigm for the
workers’ revolution
 It is also a fictionalized account of growing up in a
working-class community
 It dramatizes the tensions between working-class
families and bourgeois institutions of acculturation
and social control

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Jews Without Money
 It is a chronicle of the efforts of its young hero to
gain, through education, work or politics, a
meaningful life in a hostile world
 Gold openly declared his literary debt to Jack
London, as well as to Walt Whitman, who seemed
to have influenced very much the style of the book
 A blend of the journalistic and declarative, the
sentimental and the hyperbolic

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“Go Left, Young Writers!”
New Masses, January 1929
 “A new writer has been appearing; a wild youth
of about twenty-two, the son of a working-class
parents, who himself works in the lumber
camps, coal mines, and steel mills, harvest
fields and mountain camps of America. He is
sensitive and impatient. He writes in jets of
exasperated feeling and has no time to polish his
work. He is violent and sentimental by turns.

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“Go Left, Young Writers!”
 He lacks self-confidence but writes because he must -
and because he has a real talent. He is a Red but has
few theories. It is all instinct with him. His writing is
no conscious attaining after proletarian art, but the
natural flower of his environment. He writes that way
because it is the only way for him. His “spiritual"
attitudes are all mixed up with tenements, factories,
lumber camps and steel mills, because that is his life.
A Jack London or a Walt Whitman will come out of
this new crop of young workers... in the New Masses.”

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Red Literary Journals
 The Liberator, 1918 - 1924,
edited by Max and Crystal
Booklets Eastman; merged with the Labor
from
the American
Herald and Soviet Russia
Communist Pictorial to form Workers
Party Monthly
from the 1930s
.
 Gold became its Associate Editor
in 1921
 There he published his article
"Towards Proletarian Art”

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“Towards Proletarian Art”
 “I was born in a tenement. All that I know of Life I
learned in the tenement.The tenement is in my blood.
When I think it is the tenement thinking. When I hope
it is the tenement hoping, I am not an individual; I am
all that the tenement group poured into me during
those early years of my spiritual travail. Why should
we artists born in tenements go beyond them for our
expression? What is art? Life for us has been the
tenement that bore and molded us.”

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The Liberator
 The Liberator became
the cultural journal of
the Communist party
 Turned into a wholly
political one in the
mid-twenties
 Gold helped found
The New Masses

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The Masses
 An influential
revolutionary
magazine edited by
Max Eastman and
Floyd Dell
 Gold published his
first literary piece, a
poem about anarchists
there

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The New Masses
 Devoted to
publishing literary
works by workers
rather than by literary
leftists with working-
class sympathies
 Became its editor-in-
chief in 1928

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The New Masses
 One of the most bitter fights that the
magazine was engaged into was its
conflict with the doctrines of the New
Humanism.
 As Edmund Wilson put it this marked
“the eruption of the Marxist issues out of
the literary circle of the radicals into the
field of general criticism”
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The New Humanists
 The New Humanists were not defenders of
any specific economic or political program
but were nonetheless defenders of property
 Property was for Paul Elmer More and Irving
Babbitt more important than the right to life
 They had few disciples outside the academy
before the twenties, but in the 1930s they
became more militant

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Humanism and America
 The New Humanists’ manifesto
 Argued for social order, self-discipline, and a
responsible elite while criticizing uncontrolled
individualism, hedonism and sentimental
humanitarianism
 To Michael Gold they were simply fascists
 He severely attacked Thornton Wilder’s novels,
which he incorrectly labelled as the quintessence of
New Humanism

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Humanism and America
 The article provoked a six-month debate over
these issues
 Once the debate was over the New
Humanists and their cause disappeared from
public sight
 Their programme for spiritual rehabilitation
and emotional restraint had little appeal for
Depression America

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The New Masses versus
the New Humanists
 Another blow to the New
Humanists was the Nobel
Prize for literature in
1930 for Sinclair Lewis
and not for Paul Elmer
More
 Lewis and his work was
seen as the symbol of a
new and powerful
American literature

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Sinclair Lewis
 He was seen as a liberal, energetic
writer who showed in unsolemn way
the gulf between America’s material
and intellectual achievements
 In his acceptance speech Lewis
ridiculed the “chilly enthusiasm” and
“nebulous cult” of the New Humanists

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The Partisan Review
 Founded by William Phillips and Philip Rahv
in 1934 as an outgrowth of the John Reed
Club, the arts branch of the ACP
 They were less inclined to follow the aesthetic
view of their teachers from The New Masses
as well as the directives from the Communist
Party, which conceived of art as a weapon to
be employed in the war against capitalism

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The Partisan Review
 Found its true identity later in the decade, when
disillusionment with the Soviet Union took the
form of a fierce critique of Stalinism in all its
guises
 It also opposed the debasement of art into the
low propaganda of proletarian novels (Clara
Weatherwax's Marching! Marching!) and
agitprop plays (Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty)

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 The Partisan Review
 Exemplified the problems concerning the
response of the writers of that time to the
issues of art and literature
 The editors wanted to adapt the experiments
of Joyce and Eliot to “revolutionary tasks”
 Not ready to denounce “Bohemian
individualism and irresponsibility”
 Talented unattached writers could not be
lured if subjected to proletarian art
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The Partisan Review
 In 1936 the magazine
was closed
 Reorganized and started
again in 1937
 Instead of unknown
proletarian writers there
started to appear works
by T. S. Eliot,
A.Tate,W. H. Auden

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The Federal Writers' Project
(1935-42)
 The Great Depression seemed to demand that
the writers leave their ivory towers and start
working for the social reconstruction of society
 One of the ways was the engagement of many
of the writers of the 1930s in the Federal
Writers' Project (1935-42) which was a section
of the government-funded Works
Progress/Projects Administration

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The Federal Writers' Project
 The most significant achievement was the production
of a series of state guide books, American Guide Series
 Created a new kind of human and historical geography,
a kaleidoscopic picture of the 'real' United States
 ”The task of digging into folklore and ethnic culture
turned out to be the most effective measure that could
have been taken to nurture the future of US literature.”

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American Guide Series

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The Federal Writers' Project
 The writers who benefited from this project
 Richard Wright
 Saul Bellow
 Ralph Ellison
 Others, like John Cheever, felt that the anonymity
of their work was destroying their creativity
 Withdrew from the project the moment they were
able to earn their living on their own

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Women Writers from the 1930s
 Very strong presence of women writers
 Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth (1929)
 Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl, I Hear Men
Talking
 Olive Tilford Dargan’s Call Home the
Heart

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Women Writers from the 1930s
 Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio (1938-39) and
“The Iron Throat” (1972)
 Tess Slesinger’s The Unpossessed (1934)
and her short stories collection Time: The
Present (1935)
 Josephine Herbst’s trilogy Pity is not
Enough (1933), The Executioner Waits
(1934), Rope of Gold (1939)

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 Women Writers
 Very different one from another
 All novels about the tensions between sexual
awakening and political consciousness
 Between modernism of style and the effort to
reach a working-class consciousness
 Between the writer as seller of words or as
peoples’ oracle; the logic of individual
advancement and the power of collectivity

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Henry Roth 1906-1995

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Henry Roth
 Graduated from the City College of NY
 During his college years he started to write,
encouraged by the poet and professor of
English literature Eda Lou Walton, 12 years
his senior, with whom he lived in her
Greenwich Village house
 There he met such writers as Hart Crane and
Margaret Mead

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Call It Sleep
 Received moderate critical praise and went soon
out of print and was forgotten
 The story recorded six years in the life of a Jewish
immigrant boy, a six-to eight-year-old David
Schearl, in a New York ghetto just prior to World
War I
 Though shielded by his mother, David finds his life
turning into a nightmare when his paranoid father
is unable to hold a job

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Call It Sleep
 David's father is
"one might as well call it sleep" tormented by his lack of
success and he becomes
increasingly menacing to
his son, believing that he
is not his son
 After the boy survives a
deathly initiation, he
closes his eyes, with his
mother beside him

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Call It Sleep
 Influenced by James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, among
the first to bring interior monologue
 The world of the immigrants' Lower East Side,
David's Oedipal conflicts, his encounter of anti-
Semitism, neighborhood gangs, and an early
introduction to sex
 An extremely impressive way of using dialect,
broken English, mispronounced words and the
language of David's mind

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 Call It Sleep and the Left

 The novel was dismissed by the leftist

New Masses and the Communist Party,
whose member he became in 1934
 The editors complained that it's "a pity that
so many young writers drawn from the
proletariat can make no better use of their
working class experience than as material
for introspective novels”

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Call It Sleep and the Left
 Not praised for its social critique, more
concerned with the psychological development
of his characters, Freud's ideas, and linguistic
considerations
 One of the finest works of proletarian novel for
some, although Roth did not particularly focus
on the sufferings of the working class
 Suffered from both political pressures on his
writing and from his life with Walton

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Roth’s Works
 Because of this experience he never gained an
independence and could never get beyond the level
of the talented protege
 Started a second novel, an autobiographical work,
intended to please the Communist Party but
destroyed it in the beginning
 In the 1940's burned his journals and manuscripts
and published no more novels until 1994, a very
long writer's crisis

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Roth’s Other Works
 In the late 1960s began writing again on a grant
from the American Academy, the D.H.
Lawrence Fellowship at the University of New
Mexico
 Call It Sleep was reissued in paperback in 1964,
sold a million copies, and he together with his
wife Muriel Parker, whom he married in 1939,
settled in Albuquerque

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Roth’s Other Works
 A collection of short stories, 1987
 Mercy of a Rude Stream, 1994
 The story set in the 1920s about Ira Stigman's family
who moves to Harlem
 The young Ira has problems with his emerging
sexuality, but he also asks himself "What was human
life striving after?"
 “If you could put words to what you felt, it was
yours"

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Roth’s Other Works
 Driving Rock on the Hudson (1995)
 Observations from his own life
 Continued the story of the tortured hero Ira Stigman
 Follows Ira's school years and his introduction to
literature and writing
 Died on October 1995, and the third volume of the
intended six-volume series, From Bondage,
published posthumously in 1996

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Other Proletarian Writers
 The titles of the novels published by other
proletarian writers during the 1930s speak
much about the social and psychological
climate of the times
 The Disinherited published by Jack Conroy
in 1933
 Waiting for Nothing by Tom Kromer
published in 1935

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John Steinbeck 1902-1968

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John Steinbeck
and Proletarian Art
 A major example of the relation
between politics and the literary art
 Between the political and social
movements that grew out of the
economic distress of the thirties and the
efforts of the American novelists to give
those movements shape and meaning

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John Steinbeck and California

 The first writer to establish his native

California scene as a fertile domain for
the novelistic imagination
 A clear consciousness of the
movement from the American East to
the Far West as both a significant
historical reality and a symbolic action
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Steinbeck and Regionalism
 A regionalist writer
 F. J. Turner’s study of the struggle between
the 'sections' of America in nineteenth century
 The distinction between region as an area
defined by its internal characteristics and
“section” as an area defined by its
characteristic political interactions needing
constant redefining

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Motifs in Steinbeck’s Works
 One of the basic motifs in his fiction: a
celebrational sense of life, a sense of promise and
possibility and of as yet unspoiled novelty in man
and his habitation
 The second motif in Steinbeck's works springs
from his awareness of the tragic division between
man and man which leads directly to the political
theme
 Best expressed in The Grapes of Wrath

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The Grapes of Wrath
 In contrast to the trilogy by John Dos Passos,
U.S.A (1930, 1932, 1936, collected 1937)
which is a biting satire and pessimistic story
of American commercialism and exploitation,
his novel is much more possitive and hopeful
 The story of the epic trek of Oklahoma and
Texas families who driven off their land
sought the Promised Land of California

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The Grapes of Wrath
 Encompass many of the themes and
experiences of the nineteen-thirties
 The Joad family is part of the army of
the hungry, and the discontent who in
spite of all disasters retains the bravery
and inherent goodness of ordinary
people
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The Grapes of Wrath and
Proletarian Art
 Though the book was praised by the
communist reviewers, it is clearly a New Deal
book and not a proletarian art book
 It was far more persuasive than the works of
the Communists writers mainly because it
framed the scenes of social injustice in
accounts of the life of the ordinary American
farmers

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Style and Ideology
 There are many fine and moving things in
the book and he has given it momentum, an
inner drive, which in his generation only
Faulkner has equaled
 Yet the book does not manage to expose
beneath the particular miseries and
misfortunes the existence of what is called
the human condition

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Agrarian Utopia
 The book does not succeed in transcending its
political theme and remains with only a political
answer to the basic question “What is man?”
 Nevertheless, his sympathy for the migrant
workers and the downtrodden is evident
throughout the whole book. Its center of value
seems to be a kind of “agrarian
Utopia”maintained by the New Deal policy

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Steinbeck’s Other Works
 In Dubious Battle (1936), his most
“proletarian” novel of class struggle
 Tortilla Flat (1935)
 Of Mice and Men (1937)
 Cannery Row (1945)
 East of Eden (1952)
 The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)

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Steinbeck’s Contribution
 Established himself as a writer who managed
to catch vividly in a distinct lyric style the
qualities of speech, the character, the
legends, and the humour of his native region
 He was a very good storyteller whose
reforming vision led him to contrast the
conflicting moral codes of people in search
of permanent ideals

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