Books From the Great Depression

Peter Conn selects unsurpassed novels about the Depression

1. Now in November
By Josephine Winslow Johnson
Simon & Schuster, 1934
A fictional account of one family's experience on the land, Josephine Winslow Johnson's best-selling novel won the Pulitzer Prize before sinking into undeserved obscurity. The Haldmarnes leave an unnamed city for the countryside when Father loses a good job in a lumber mill and with it any hope of financial security for his wife and their three daughters. The mortgaged farm to which the family moves yields little: The novel's central section is a day-by-day reckoning of the land's collapse into baked and cracking clay during the killing drought in the Great Plains of the 1930s. "Now in November" is one of the most convincing and hair-raising depictions of the Dust Bowl in the literature of the Depression. Unfortunately, history would find room for only one Dust Bowl novel, John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath."
2. The Big Money
By John Dos Passos
Harcourt, Brace, 1936
Norman Mailer often said that John Dos Passos had written the great American novel in the three volumes of the "U.S.A." trilogy. "The Big Money" was the final volume in the series, and its success put Dos Passos on the cover of Time magazine. The novel deploys several narrative techniques in an effort to tell the whole story of America's march toward the Crash. Long conventional storylines alternate with stream-of-consciousness monologues, brief biographies of famous and infamous Americans, and "newsreels" made up of newspaper headlines, popular songs and advertising slogans. "The Big Money" opens at the end of World War I and concludes in the early years of the Depression. The final scene presents a vagrant trying to hitch a ride: The open road to American opportunity has become a dead end. Dos Passos's sustained, bitter and often funny exposé of Roaring Twenties excess is the best fictional explanation ever written of how Americans got themselves in the biggest economic mess in their history.
3. Appointment in Samarra
By John O'Hara
Harcourt, Brace, 1934
John O'Hara's first and best novel tracks the final three days in the life of a young man named Julian English. He is 30 years old, charming and good-looking, married to an attractive woman, and successful as the manager of a Cadillac franchise in a town called Gibbsville. Julian is also a dangerous drunk and a moral trifler, filled with envy and insecurity, a man with no discernible convictions. His rapid decline in the course of the novel is an emblem of moral exhaustion. "Appointment in Samarra" is set in 1930, after the Crash but before the advent of the New Deal. O'Hara always insisted on the precision of that date: His failed hero registers the sense of impending and general collapse.
4. The Good Earth
By Pearl S. Buck
John Day, 1931
A Pulitzer Prize winner, Pearl S. Buck's "The Good Earth" was also the best-selling novel in the U.S. for both 1931 and 1932. The book would shape American perceptions of China for two generations. The main characters, a poor farmer named Wang Lung and his wife, O-lan, are recognizable human beings, not mere Oriental stereotypes, who do their best to survive in a punishing world of famine, bandits, war and plague. Why did a book about an obscure rural family in a distant land sell so well in the early Depression years? To begin with, Buck was a fine storyteller, and her images of the Chinese countryside are memorably vivid. Beyond that, the novel resonated with the realities of Depression America: The portraits of suffering but resilient Chinese farmers spoke eloquently to Americans trying to make sense of their own diminished circumstances.
5. The Day of the Locust
By Nathanael West
Random House, 1939
The best novel ever written about Hollywood appeared in the last years of the Depression. A young artist, Todd Hackett, has come to the West Coast to paint the legions of bored and lonely men and women who migrate to California in pursuit of a dream they never find. The studios' celluloid fantasies mock the deprivation of the country throughout the 1930s, providing escapist entertainment in the midst of despair. The novel is punctuated with scenes of violence -- drunken brawls, bloody cockfights, sexual assault -- that unfold in the glow of Southern California's legendary warmth and sunshine. In the climactic scene, a murderous riot provoked by a movie premiere provides a "real" counterpart to Todd's painting, "The Burning of Los Angeles."
Mr. Conn's "The American 1930s: A Literary History" has just been published by Cambridge University Press.

A Stimulus Deal for Writers

Soul of a People
by David A. Taylor
Wiley, 260 pages, $27.95)

Writers and artists have "got to eat, just like other people," Harry Hopkins, director of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration, observed during the middle of the Depression. The statement was true enough, of course, but Hopkins offered it defensively. With about 20% of the labor force unemployed in 1935, the WPA aimed to provide jobs to the millions of employable people on relief – including writers, artists, musicians and actors. The chief purpose of the Federal Writers' Project, as with the other WPA programs for the artistic downtrodden, was to sustain the individuals and, by giving them paid work, keep up their morale and their skills. Secondary was the hope of the Writers' Project's director, Henry Alsberg, and other idealists that the ultimate result of their work – principally, comprehensive guidebooks for each of the 48 states and Washington, D.C., as well as New York and other cities – would be an honest and even ennobling portrait of America.

My copy of the WPA Guide to New York is a treasure.

Alfred Kazin, in his 1942 masterwork, "On Native Grounds," hailed the WPA guides as not merely "a super-Baedeker" but "a repository as well as a symbol of the reawakened American sense of its own history."

The guidebooks "made up America's first self-portrait," says Mr. Taylor. He takes his title from a claim by Mark Twain that "when a thousand able novels have been written" about a people, then "there you have the soul of the people." Though the guidebooks were not novels and did not number 1,000, the enthusiastic Mr. Taylor fancies that the WPA writers engaged in "the kind of experiment" that Twain had in mind.

"one of the serious deficiencies" in the Federal Writers' Project (which at its peak in 1936 employed nearly 6,700 people) was "the sharply uneven distribution of literary talent throughout its forty-nine offices," noted Jerre Mangione in "The Dream and the Deal" (1972), which remains by far the best account of the Project. Not surprisingly, he said, "the ablest writers on the Project were to be found in New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco – those traditional incubating centers of literary talent." There were, of course, exceptions, a notable one being Vardis Fisher, who wrote most of the Idaho guidebook and managed to get it published first of all the guidebooks – and to enthusiastic reviews from around the country. Mr. Taylor's chapter on Fisher and the Idaho Project is one of his most interesting.

... politics – communism in particular – played a big role in many of these writers' lives. Mr. Taylor acknowledges the often divisive Communist presence in the Project but says hardly a critical word about it. He devotes much ink to Richard Wright but fails to tell, as Wright himself did in his memoir "Black Boy," how after he broke with the Communist Party and joined the Writers' Project in Chicago, the many Party members in the Project ostracized him and tried to get him fired as an incompetent.

I read about that in Hazel Rowley's biography of Richard Wright.

as Jerre Mangione observed, the reawakening of Americans' interest in their own history that Alfred Kazin perceived in the guidebooks had to be postponed, because of World War II: "The guidebooks were virtually forgotten as a symbol and largely ignored for their practical value." But, as he and Mr. Taylor make clear, readers, especially writers and editors, who have discovered the somewhat outdated volumes in recent decades have found them useful and illuminating, and even inspiring.