The Great Depression had a profound psychological effect on many Americans, shaking their faith in capitalist ideology. The notions that opportunity was equal and unlimited and that success was assured for energetic, hardworking, talented individuals no longer seemed valid. In The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 (1993), historian Robert S. McElvaine writes, “Perhaps the chief impact of the Great Depression was that it . . . took away, at least temporarily, the easy assumptions of expansion and mobility that had decisively influenced so much of past American thinking.”
In his groundbreaking study Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (1961), Daniel Aaron asserts that “American literature, for all of its affirmative spirit, is the most searching and unabashed criticism of our national limitations that exists.” Homegrown socialist critiques of American capitalism from the early years of the twentieth century include Upton Sinclair in The Jungle (1906), Jack London in Iron Heel (1908), and Max Eastman and Floyd Dell in the journal The Masses, which was suppressed for its opposition to the involvement of the United States in World War I. In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Eastman founded The Liberator (1918–1924), a more radical successor to The Masses. In 1919, John Reed, a former writer for The Masses, published his admiring account of the revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World.
The influence of Marxist ideas and language among the American Left increased with the establishment of the Soviet Union. In “Towards a Proletarian Art,” an editorial in the February 1921 issue of The Liberator, Michael Gold invoked Walt Whitman as well as the Russian proletariat, arguing against the leisured intellectuals centered in magazines such as The Little Review and Seven Arts:
“It is not in that hot-house air that the lusty great tree will grow. Its roots must be in the fields, factories, and workshops of America—in the American life. When there is singing and music rising in every American street, when in every American factory there is a drama group of the workers, when mechanics paint in their leisure, and farmers write sonnets, the greater art will grow and only then. Only a creative nation understands creation. Only an artist understands art.”
Gold concludes that a proletarian art must come “from the deepest depths upward.”
In the latter half of the 1920s, before the stock-market crash, the deepening radicalism of many American writers was evident in organized support for Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian-born anarchists whose 1921 trial and conviction and 1927 executions became a cause célèbre for the literary Left, as well as in the founding of the New Playwrights Theater (1926–1929) and The New Masses (1926–1948), a literary journal that under Gold’s editorship became a vehicle for the promotion of proletarian culture by the Communist Party, including the creation of John Reed Clubs across the country. Writers such as Nelson Algren, Langston Hughes, Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, and Richard Wright were members of the clubs. In “Go Left, Young Writers?” an editorial in the January 1929 issue, Gold wrote, “In the past eight months the New Masses has been slowly finding its path toward the goal of a proletarian literature in America.”
But despite the theoretical pronouncements of Gold and a continuing debate about the definition of proletarian literature by other writers, including Eastman, V. F. Calverton, Joseph Freeman, and Granville Hicks, the term in practice, especially as the economic crisis deepened in the early 1930s, was used loosely to describe any work that showed sympathy with the poor and working classes or that was critical of capitalism.
A means of criticizing the deficiencies, failures, and brutalities of American capitalism, proletarian literature flourished during the Great Depression. Poets treating proletarian themes included Kenneth Fearing, Kenneth Patchen, Muriel Rukeyser, Genevieve Taggard, and Carl Sandburg. Playwrights such as Clifford Odets in Waiting for Lefty (1935) and John Howard Lawson in Marching Song (1937) explored strained labor relations. Some of the most notable novels of the 1930s, including Gold’s Jews without Money (1930), Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934), Nelson Algren’s Somebody in Boots (1935), John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), depicted the desperate conditions of the underclass. Other outstanding achievements of the decade included novel trilogies by John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, Daniel Fuchs, and Josephine Herbst.
Reading Proletarian Literature in the United States: An Anthology (1935), edited by Hicks and others, is an excellent way for students to gain insight into the spirit of this literature. Writing Red: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930–1940 (1987), edited by Charlotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz, is also recommended. Jon Christian Suggs’s American Proletarian Culture: The Twenties and Thirties (1993), Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series, volume 11, a copiously illustrated history of the era, provides context for understanding the literature in its evolving culture.
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND RESEARCH
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In the introduction to his Proletarian Writers of the Thirties (1968) David Madden acknowledges the problems inherent in the label proletarian and cites a letter he received from an indignant Herbst, a novelist who believed that her work had been “considerably damaged” by being categorized as such:
“Who thinks up these things and makes the selections? Who says what is what? There were actually arguments about the word ‘proletarian’ when it was pitched in, during the thirties. I thought of the writing as ‘revolutionary’ in the sense that the whole century was going to be involved, in one way or another, with revolution, and I think this is quite right. But proletarian was a narrow word, and part of the jargon.”
After you read a particular “proletarian” work—say, Herbst’s The Executioner Waits (1934)—research the background of the writer and the way the work was received. Was the word proletarian used in reviews? Was the writer’s background mentioned, and did it seem to be a factor in how the work was evaluated? Is the label proletarian appropriate for the work?
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In “Notes of the Month,” an editorial published in the September 1930 issue of The New Masses and reprinted in part in Suggs’s American Proletarian Culture, Gold lists nine elements of what he calls “Proletarian Realism.” Among other claims, he contends that a work of this kind must deal “with real conflicts of men and women who work for a living” and must never be “pointless”: “Every poem, every novel and drama, must have a social theme.”
One of the more interesting elements he elaborates has to do with the writer’s attitude toward his or her material:
“Away with drabness, the bourgeois notion that the Worker’s life is sordid, the slummer’s disgust and feeling of futility. There is horror and drabness in the Worker’s life; and we will portray it; but we know this is not the last word; we know that this manure heap is the hope of the future; we know that not pessimism, but revolutionary élan will sweep this mess out of the world forever.”
Do you think these considerations are important for evaluating a literary work of art? Does the work you have read meet Gold’s criteria?
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The first American Writers’ Congress was held in New York City in 1935 in response to a call from The New Masses for a gathering to discuss the writing craft and the responsibilities of the community of writers. Wright was the keynote speaker. While the Communist Party USA sponsored the congress, it was attended by leftists of various stripes, many of whom loudly resisted the attempt by the Communists to dictate how writers should respond to current social and political issues.
By the time of the second American Writers’ Congress in 1937, the Communist Party had declared the Popular Front, which involved a less polarizing approach to writers’ concerns. Papers delivered at both congresses have been published in collections edited by Henry Hart.
Read a selection of essays from the 1935 congress and consider what the responsibility of the writer at such a time might have been and what degree of control the Communist Party sought to exercise over writers. Are there similarly politicized groups today? Do they have a legitimate function?
Read a selection of essays from the 1937 congress. What are the differences in political philosophy between the two congresses?
RESOURCES
Primary Works
Jack Conroy and Curt Johnson, eds., Writers in Revolt: The Anvil Anthology (New York & Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1973).
Includes work by such writers as Nelson Algren, Erskine Caldwell, Langston Hughes, Meridel Le Sueur, Frank Yerby, and Kenneth Patchen. Conroy’s introduction gives a brief history of The Anvil (1932–1935) and The New Anvil (1939–1940); he asserts that The Anvil was “the pioneer of proletarian magazines devoted solely to creative work—fiction and verse—and lasted through more issues than any of the rest.”
Henry Hart, ed., American Writers’ Congress (New York: International Publishers, 1935).
A collection of twenty-eight papers delivered at the first congress of the League of American Writers. In his introduction Hart writes of the class struggle in which the interests of writers are inseparable from those of “the propertyless and oppressed.”
Hart, ed., The Writer in a Changing World (New York: Equinox Cooperative Press, 1937).
Papers delivered at the second American Writers’ Congress, with an introduction by Joseph Freeman.
Granville Hicks, Joseph North, Michael Gold, Paul Peters, Isidor Schneider, and Alan Calmer, eds., Proletarian Literature in the United States: An Anthology, introduction by Joseph Freeman (New York: International Publishers, 1935).
Valuable both as a historical document and as an interesting collection; includes the writings of more than fifty authors divided into five sections: “Fiction,” “Poetry,” “Reportage,” “Drama,” and “Literary Criticism.”
Charlotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz, eds., Writing Red: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930–1940 (New York: Feminist Press of The City University of New York, 1987).
Focuses on neglected women writers who “contributed to and were themselves moved by the intellectual, literary, and political energy of the left.” This anthology presents writings of more than thirty authors, divided into three sections: “Fiction,” “Poetry,” and “Reportage, Theory, and Analysis.”
Joseph North, ed., New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties (New York: International Publishers, 1969).
Edited by the principal founder of the weekly New Masses, which began publication in January 1934. The anthology is divided into five sections: “Poetry,” “Short Stories and Sketches,” “Reportage,” “The Writer and Society,” and “Essays and Comment.” An appendix reprints the 22 January 1935 “Call for an American Writers’ Congress.”
Harvey Swados, ed., The American Writer and the Great Depression (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966).
An anthology designed to convey the impact of the Depression and to offer “a cross section of good writing of the period.”
Bibliography
David R. Peck, American Marxist Literary Criticism, 1926–1941: A Bibliography (New York: American Institute for Marxist Studies, 1975).
Includes a list of Marxist periodicals and of “critics and criticism in books and periodicals buried in the records of Depression radicalism.”
Criticism
Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961).
A chronicle of the involvement of American writers with the Far Left in the first half of the twentieth century. Mixing group narratives, representative figures, and interchapters in a manner inspired by John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. (1938), Aaron creates a reliable and readable work of literary and cultural history. It is, however, limited by his neglect of women, minorities, and drama and his focus on New York writers.
James D. Bloom, Left Letters: The Culture Wars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
A study of “perhaps the most prominent literary Communists” of the 1920s and 1930s that examines “what they accomplished and what they set out to achieve.”
Franklin Folsom, Days of Anger, Days of Hope (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1994).
Memoir of the man who was the executive secretary of the League of American Writers from 1937 to 1942. An excellent account of the inner workings of the most active Communist writers’ organization of the time, the book includes a good bibliography of other works related to proletarian literature.
David Madden, ed., Proletarian Writers of the Thirties (Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Press / London & Amsterdam: Feffer & Simons, 1968).
A collection of essays by various critics. Writers discussed include John Dos Passos, Edward Dahlberg, Robert Cantwell, Jack Conroy, and Daniel Fuchs.
Bill Mullen and Sherry Lee Linkon, eds., Radical Revisions: Rereading 1930s Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996).
Essay collection that poses “a new set of questions about the 1930s,” showing particular interest in issues of gender and race.
Walter B. Rideout, The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900–1954 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956).
Attempts a “reasonable” discussion “of a body of fiction which once was exaltedly praised in some quarters and now in most quarters is categorically condemned.”
Jon Christian Suggs, ed., Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series, volume 11: American Proletarian Culture: The Twenties and Thirties (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman/Gale Research, 1993).
Following a useful historical overview, presents revealing letters, articles, reports, and essays arranged chronologically to raise “representative issues and theories of working-class, proletarian, and revolutionary literature and culture.”
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