The Literature of Extreme Poverty in the Great Depression

Abstract The Literature of Extreme Poverty in the Great Depression studies a forgotten side of modernism: the literature of unemployment and poverty in the 1930s, especially fiction and poetry about people starving on the street or half-starving on welfare, people who often don’t know where they’ll find something to eat that night or whether they’ll find someplace to sleep. They spend the night on park benches or in filthy flophouses, or they trade sex for food and shelter, or they starve. Time itself changes. For the starving poor standing for hours and hours in a breadline, the speed of modern culture slows down. This book expands on previous studies of the 1930s by recovering the fiction and poetry of dozens of forgotten writers and reading them together with political cartoons and with underknown writing by such acclaimed or understudied writers as Langston Hughes, Tom Kromer, Dorothy West, and Martha Gellhorn. From an age so immersed in despair and suffering that many writers came to doubt the very idea of literary aesthetics, this book rescues a vast archive of literary analogues to the famous documentary photographs that burned the Depression into American visual memory. It shapes a collective portrait and interpretation of a nearly lost literary history that represents a nation, its crisis, and its literature of crisis from the bottom up rather than from the top down.