AMERICAN LITERATURE OF THE 1930s

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AMERICANLITERATURE OF THE 1930s

• POLITICS AND AESTHTICS IN THE RED DECADE

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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 Odetss proletarian play
  Wating for Lefty (1935) and Henry Roths 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 Eastman merged with the Labor Herald and
  Soviet Russia Pictorial to form Workers Monthly
• Gold became its Associate Editor in 1921
• There he published his article "Towards
  Proletarian Art

Booklets from the American Communist Party
from the 1930s .
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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 Wilders 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 versusthe 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 Americas
  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 Smedleys Daughter of Earth (1929)
• Meridel Le Sueurs The Girl, I Hear Men Talking
• Olive Tilford Dargans Call Home the Heart

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Women Writers from the 1930s

• Tillie Olsens Yonnondio (1938-39) and The Iron
  Throat (1972)
• Tess Slesingers The Unpossessed (1934) and her
  short stories collection Time The Present (1935)
• Josephine Herbsts 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 tormented by his lack of
  success and he becomes increasingly menacing to
  the son, believing that he is not his son
• After the boy survives a deathly initiation, he
  closes his eyes, with his mother beside him

"one might as well call it sleep"
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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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Roths 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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Roths 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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Roths 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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Roths 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 Steinbeckand 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. Turners 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 Steinbecks 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 Utopiamaintained by the New
  Deal policy

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Steinbecks 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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Steinbecks 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