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The American 1930s: A Literary History, by Peter Conn
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Beginning with the stock market crash of 1929 and ending with America's entry into the Second World War, the long Depression decade was a period of immense social, economic and political turmoil. In response, writers as various as John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, Langston Hughes, Pearl S. Buck and others looked to the past to make sense of the present. In this important new study of the 1930s, the distinguished cultural historian Peter Conn traces the extensive and complex engagement with the past that characterized the imaginative writing of the decade. Moving expertly between historical events and literature, Conn includes discussions of historical novels, plays and poems, biographies and autobiographies, as well as factual and imaginary works of history. Mapping the decade's extraordinary intellectual range with authority and flair, The American 1930s is a widely anticipated contribution to American literary studies.
- Sales Rank: #2518722 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Cambridge University Press
- Published on: 2009-03-23
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.98" h x .51" w x 5.98" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 280 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
From The New Yorker
In this literary history, Conn offers a corrective to the assumption that the Depression decade was dominated culturally by leftist aesthetics and politics. Organized as a series of case studies, the book reveals fascinating vicissitudes of art and history. In a section on frontier fiction, a genre with a long lineage, Conn notes that it developed �edges� in the thirties, its self-reliant heroes newly resonant with a nation of �diminished� men. Though the thirties� best-sellers reflected �the racism that continued to deform� society (�Gone with the Wind� appeared in 1936), it was also the decade when �the pseudo-scientific bases on which racism was grounded were decisively confounded,� as students of Franz Boas, including Zora Neale Hurston and Ruth Benedict, rose to prominence. Taken together, the studies powerfully demonstrate that, despite the strain of the Depression, the United States in the thirties was �a place of enormous ideological and imaginative complexity.�
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Review
"In this literary history, Conn offers a corrective to the assumption that the Depression decade was dominated culturally by leftist aesthetics and politics. Organized as a series of case studies, the book reveals fascinating vicissitudes of art and history."
The New Yorker
About the Author
Peter Conn is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Everything Old is New Again
By Aceto
T.S. Eliot wrote about keeping continuity with the tradition. His poems illuminated the stark consequences of our breaking with our ancient well springs: dryness, dust and despair. The American dust bowl made this literary device literally true.
The American writers of the previous depression knew this lesson. Their pens were divining rods searching for our national well source. How timely for Dr. Conn to bring us back to this generation, following that lost generation of WWI. I had always thought of them as the avant garde, iconoclastic bringers of a new epoch. What had I missed?
Dr. Conn starts with five pages of "a cultural and political timeline". No big deal, but handy, as it gives an international frame of reference. He sets out a history of this period as an introductory backdrop. He presents a particularly stinging continuity of American behavior from that depression to this, i.e., the victims blame themselves. Sure, there is talk of the causes of that economic failure, but finally, each citizen blames only himself. One young woman says "I am just no good." These disconnects are puzzling and daunting. Evidently, we considered our depression of the 30s more akin to the dust bowl or some other sort of natural disaster. Americans are loathe to blame authority for stupidity, greed or arrogance, so we take the burden on our own backs instead.
Dr. Conn sees the resolution for holding these contradictions as looking to the past for what he terms "a usable past". Rather than Ford's "History is bunk.", Americans saw history as salve and touchstone. To relegate the 30s as "the red decade" is to loose the tremendous grit and resolve of Americans in hardship. It is to lose the complexity and the very truths of those mean years.
I like Dr. Conn's treatment of the 20s, because both the Great War and the 20's are profoundly different and so helpful before he begins his central discussion. Whether or not you buy into his argument, you will appreciate his scholarship and enjoy his study.
But you must at least consider his argument that the 1930s found American writers looking to the past to deal with the terrible present. I thought I had a fair grasp of the writing of this period until I waded into his listing of prize winners and best sellers, not only in fiction, but in all categories. I have read a mere thirty-eight of them. He says it best: "A number of texts discussed in this book, apart from their own contribution to American diversity, are worth recovering and reading on their own terms. ... History should take some account of books that were actually read."
Even if his premise leaves you unconvinced, his book is a fine reference work at the very least. More likely, you will enjoy his central chapters enough to read more of these works. I have a load of new reading to do for sure, but he is also sending me back for another reading of 'Our Town" because of his savory discussion. Scholarly as it is, this book is never plodding or ponderous. Rather, Dr. Conn breathes fresh breath into our world nearly eighty years past.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
A Social History of the 1930s
By takingadayoff
The American 1930s: A Literary History is also a social history, showing us what Americans were reading and talking about. In the early part of the decade, Americans were still obsessed with World War I, but as more immediate problems pushed past problems aside, literature focused on biography and historical fiction. In much the same way we now find ourselves looking to the 1930s to make sense of our current financial predicaments, the readers of the 1930s looked to history as well.
The American 1930s is good for discovering writers you may have missed and for avoiding works you keep meaning to read. For example, author Peter Conn's description of the alternately torrid and glacial Anthony Adverse has convinced me that I needn't put it on my list of books to read.
On the other hand, in the chapter about biography, Conn discusses Susan Glaspell's play Alison's House, based on the life of Emily Dickinson. Elaine Showalter's new book A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, takes its title from the title of a Susan Glaspell short story. How I had missed ever hearing of this writer until now? Glaspell's A Jury of Her Peers is an understated story that sneaks up on the reader like an Alan Bennett play.
Americans in the 1930s were preoccupied with more than the Depression and the possibility of another war. Racial issues continued to plague the U.S. Not coincidentally, the southern states were still coming to grips with their past, specifically the Civil War and its aftermath. In fact, one of the major endeavors of the Federal Writers' Project of the New Deal was to conduct interviews with over 2000 ex-slaves, in order to document their memories. Obviously by the 1930s, anyone who had been a slave was quite old, so this was the last chance for first-hand recollections. Interestingly, as Conn points out, the original transcripts of many interviews compared with the edited copies that were filed in Washington, D.C., betrayed the biases of the writers, journalists, and teachers, all of them Southern whites, who conducted the interviews.
A more popular project of the FWP during the 1930s was the American Guide Series, in which writers, including many who were or would later become famous, wrote travel guides to each of the states. They were the first travel guides for the millions of Americans who had already made the summer road trip a rite of passage. (An unfinished project of the FWP was America Eats, an uneven and unpublished collection of food writing, documented in two recent books: The Food of a Younger Land and America Eats!: On the Road with the WPA )
Conn defines Literature broadly - his book covers novels, history and biography, poetry, drama, even paintings, murals, and photography. The American 1930s: A Literary History is short, only about 250 pages, but it surveys just about all of the Pulitzer Prize winners of the decade, and in a very readable and informative way. Conn includes some middle-brow entertainments, such as Gone With the Wind, if only because it won a Pulitzer, but for the most part he steers clear of genre fiction and children's literature.
Highly recommended!
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
An excellent survey of the literature of a nation in search of its own meaning
By Robert Moore
There is a tiny bit of temporal irony in a historical survey of a decade of literature that was best characterized an ongoing obsession with America's past and its meaning for both the present of the thirties and its future. As Conn so fascinatingly chronicles, a disproportionate number of writers in the thirties persistently explored the national past in an effort as self-understanding. Many of these narratives, whether fictional, biographical, historical, or poetical, framed stories of the past in a ways to express specific understandings of what America had become as a nation. Although we often think of the thirties as a liberal, progressive decade, Conn shows how a large number of these literary works were used to express either conservative ideology or to defend traditional but undemocratic social institutions. For instance, Kenneth Roberts wrote a string of novels that were intended to undermine traditional Federalist or Jeffersonian understandings of the American Revolution, instead positing a Tory, Loyalist version of the meaning of the Revolution. Roberts embraces a version of conservative thought that seems nostalgic for a monarchy instead of a democracy.
Nor was Roberts alone in asserting regressive beliefs. Conn documents the numerous defenses of a host of ongoing and counterfactual myths about the post-Civil War south, of Southern nobility, of the goodness of the Lost Cause, of the real motives of fighting the war (hint: it had nothing to do with defending the peculiar institution of slavery), and promulgating a host of absurdities about African-Americans. These writers insisted that slavery had had a civilizing influence on the slaves, that the slaves had been treated humanely, and that the slaves had actually thrived and been happy. The ideas that corrupt carpetbaggers had come down from the North and rapaciously brutalized (even tortured) southerners and that the Ku Klux Klan had been a righteous organization that saved innocent southerners from northern depredations were routine. All of these horrible and indefensible notions can be found in the most popular novel of the decade, Margaret Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND, but also in a host of less well known literary and historical works. For the record - though it really shouldn't matter, but with so many people obsessed with the fallacy of "bias" (oh, bias exists, but it is trumped by rationality and truth, and pointing bias never really gets anyone anywhere) - I am a southerner.
But there were also more progressive, honest narratives. The greatest writer of the decade, and in Conn's (I believe correct) opinion the greatest of the century, William Faulkner, undermined every self-serving myth touching upon the south. Conn does a superb job in a few pages of situating the literary context for Faulkner's books. Against those who would idealize the south, Faulkner puts forth stories that counter myths of "the Old South, whose legacy was a bankrupt economy, barbaric racial codes, inertia that alternated with spasms of cruelty , nostalgia for blighted honor, reverence for the unspoiled land, contempt for the intellect, and a passion for talk."
Conn crosses and crisscrosses the era, examining the literature of the decade from a host of angles. Most of the books that he discusses are today forgotten. Some sound fascinating based on his summations; many are discussed more for the light that they shed on the period or because they were best sellers. But what emerges is a fascinating portrait of the decade.
Interestingly, I didn't learn of many new books that I would like to read. My attention was drawn to Emma Goldman's LIVING MY LIFE and W. E. B. Dubois's BLACK RECONSTRUCTION. Three titles that interested me to some degree were the sprawling epic ANTHONY ADVERSE by Hervey Allen, OLIVER WISWELL by Kenneth Roberts, and T. S. Stribling's southern trilogy comprised by THE FORGE, THE STORE, and THE UNFINISHED CATHEDRAL. I had, of course, heard of ANTHONY ADVERSE, but had never really considered reading it before. This book put it on my radar. The other two titles were new to me. Conn's description of Stribling's THE STORE makes it sound especially fascinating. Apart from these, I had either read all of the books that I found interesting from his description, or already had vague intentions to read them at some point.
There are always omissions in a book like this. I am quite surprised that John Steinbeck did not feature in Conn's survey at all. Neither did genre writers of any sort, whether Sci-fi (this was, after all, the decade where American Sci-fi bloomed in major fashion), Western fiction (which would have tied in nicely with his contention that American literature in the decade was concerned with the American past), or detective fiction. The thirties was, after all, the period when Raymond Chandler wrote a string of important short stories and published his first novel THE BIG SLEEP. And the decade saw the publication of almost all of Dashiell Hammett's major works. Conn doesn't even bother to justify excluding genre fiction. He simply does it without discussion. I think this was one of the few weaknesses of the book.
There were a few parts I took issue with. Near the beginning he states that historical fiction has never been taken seriously. This is simply false and is in need of serious qualification. Historical fiction has not been taken seriously in the 20th and the current centuries. Historical fiction was held in great esteem in the 19th century and a substantial number of the great novels of the century were historical, from Thackeray's VANITY FAIR and HENRY ESMOND to almost all of Walter Scott's novels to Dickens's TALE OF TWO CITIES to George Eliot's ROMOLA to WAR AND PEACE. There were a host of French (Hugo, Balzac, the Dumases, Flaubert, Stendahl) and American (Cooper, Twain, Hawthorne) and various European (Manzoni) novelists who wrote in a historical vein. Only in the next century did the historical novel fall into disfavor. There were a few other places I would have quibbled, but the only real mistaken that I want to point out it the howler of citing Gary rather than Garry Wills.
If you want an overview of the literature of one of America's most conflicted decades, you could certainly do worse than this. I definitely recommend this to anyone with a better grasp of what was taking place in American literature in the thirties.
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