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.

The Drop of a Feather

Plumes - By Sarah Stein (Yale University Press, 244 pages, $30)

Talk about crazes: The tulip mania of 1634, when speculation in tulip bulbs from Holland reached such heights that one collector paid 1,000 pounds of cheese, four oxen, eight pigs, 12 sheep, a bed and a suit of clothes for a single Viceroy bulb. The tulip market collapsed barely three years later; hundreds of investors were ruined, and thousands of bulbs lay rotting in warehouses.

Must've been, or seemed, quite a bulb, that Viceroy.

It is the tulip craze that is most often cited in discussions of speculative bubbles, like the frenzy for Internet stocks a decade ago and the more recent madness in the mortgage and credit markets. But the rage for ostrich feathers a century ago is instructive, too. When ostrich feathers flounced into vogue among the fashionable set in Paris, London and New York,

traders assumed that the popularity of plumes would stay permanently aloft, as if floating on an endless zephyr.

I can just hear it: it's different this time.

Of course there were a few cautious voices. One South African ostrich farmer warned members of the feather industry that they were dealing "with an uncertain, arbitrary, whimsical love of luxury . . . at our own risk. We cannot expect it to be durable." Such spoilsports were booed off the stage. Another dealer more typically crowed that a fine ostrich feather was "an investment for life" and that the plume "has been in fashion for centuries past, and will probably be for centuries to come. It holds its place like the diamond." At the height of the boom, Ms. Stein notes, the price per pound of plumes almost equaled that of diamonds.

That's optimistic: for centuries to come.

In South Africa, where the Barbary ostrich (prized for its extra-fluffy plumage) was domesticated and raised on ranches, and in London, where the feathers were brokered, and on New York's Lower East Side, where the feathers were applied to garments, most of the men and women in the feather business were Jewish.

Fascinating. Any parallel to the garment industry? I wonder. Certainly a parallel to other times were reactions when World War 1 spelled the end of the ostrich feather craze: with the collapse, anti-Semitism flared: "Once valued for their extra-regional contacts," Ms. Stein writes, "Jews were now disparaged for their cosmopolitanism and recast as ruthless speculators inclined to prey on economically vulnerable farmers."

However, Ms Stein does venture to say some things which might prove provocative in some quarters.

Ms. Stein, who specializes in Sephardic studies in the history department of UCLA, is quick not to attribute the rise and collapse of the feather market to Jewish cunning or sharp practice. She does, however, point to what she calls a "symbiotic relationship between ethnicity and particular commercial networks." She recognizes that this is a provocative note to strike and defends it by saying: "It has been the goal of this book to eschew the indignity that popular and scholarly sources have directly or indirectly associated with Jews' involvement in modern global commerce. This ambition has been shaped not in the interest of taboo-breaking," she writes, but because "modern Jews" undertook "commercial practices" for "clear historical reasons."

Take nerve to venture outside widely-accepted strictures and break new theoretical ground.

Ms. Stein, who specializes in Sephardic studies in the history department of UCLA, is quick not to attribute the rise and collapse of the feather market to Jewish cunning or sharp practice. She does, however, point to what she calls a "symbiotic relationship between ethnicity and particular commercial networks." She recognizes that this is a provocative note to strike and defends it by saying: "It has been the goal of this book to eschew the indignity that popular and scholarly sources have directly or indirectly associated with Jews' involvement in modern global commerce. This ambition has been shaped not in the interest of taboo-breaking," she writes, but because "modern Jews" undertook "commercial practices" for "clear historical reasons."

Clear historical reasons?

For centuries, when European Jews were ghettoized and subjected to special "Jew taxes," and not allowed to own real estate, Jews were forced into businesses dealing with products that could be easily transported from place to place – coins, precious stones, commercial paper, works of art. It was easy to roll an oil painting into a suitcase when it was time to flee. And what could be lighter than a bagful of feathers when that ominous knock from the tax collector – or someone much worse – came at the late-night door?

Lighter, but not as easy to carry as a few little stones - valuable gems - inside one's pocket or purse.

It might be simpler to say that Jews took to ostrich feathers not because of the "symbiotic relationship between ethnicity and particular commercial networks" but because of generations of hard luck.

Simpler, yes, but as accurate? Perhaps simplistic.

Not that every financial bubble-burst is the same. When the feather market collapsed, a magazine joked that the newly devalued ostrich might make a nice change for Thanksgiving dinner, adding: "Heaven help him who gets the neck."