American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940 Edited by Ichiro Takayoshi Frontmatter More Information

Home , The Late George Apley

Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-42938-2 — American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940 Edited by Ichiro Takayoshi Frontmatter More Information

AMERICAN LITERATURE IN TRANSITION, 1930–1940

American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940 gathers together in a single volume preeminent critics and historians to offer an authoritative, analytic, and theoretically advanced account of the Depression era’s key literary events. Many topics of canonical importance, such as protest literature, Hollywood fiction, the culture industry, and popu- lism, receive fresh treatment. The book also covers emerging areas of interest, such as radio drama, bestsellers, religious fiction, interna- tionalism, and middlebrow domestic fiction. Traditionally, scholars have treated each one of these issues in isolation. This volume situates all the significant literary developments of the 1930s within a single and capacious vision that discloses their hidden structural relations – their contradictions, similarities, and reciprocities. This is an excellent resource for undergraduate and graduate students, and for scholars interested in American literary culture of the 1930s.

ichiro takayoshi teaches modern American literature and social thought at Tufts University. He is the author of American Writers and the Approach of World War II, 1935–1941: A Literary History (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and editor of American Literature in Transition, 1920–1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2017). He is currently at work on a literary and intellectual history of the interwar decades.

© in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-42938-2 — American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940 Edited by Ichiro Takayoshi Frontmatter More Information

american literature in transition

American Literature in Transition captures the dynamic energies transmitted across the 20th- and 21st-century American literary landscapes. Revisionary and authoritative, the series offers a comprehensive new overview of the established literary landmarks that constitute American literary life. Ambitious in scope and depth, and accommodating new critical perspectives and approaches, this series captures the dynamic energies and ongoing change in 20th- and 21st-century American literature. These are decades of transition, but also periods of epochal upheaval. These decades – the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, the Cold War, the sixties, 9/11 – are turning points of real signiﬁcance. But in a tumultuous century, these terms can mask deeper structural changes. Each one of these books challenges in different ways the dominant approaches to a period of literature by shifting the focus from what happened to understanding how and why it happened. They elucidate the multifaceted interaction between the social and literary ﬁelds and capture that era’s place in the incremental evolution of American literature up to the present moment. Taken together, this series of books constitutes a new kind of literary history in a century of intense cultural and literary creation, a century of liberation and also of immense destruction too. As a revisionary project grounded in pre-existing debates, American Literature in Transition offers an unprecedented analysis of the American literary experience.

Books in the Series American Literature in Transition, 1910–1920 edited by mark w. van wienen American Literature in Transition, 1920–1930 edited by ichiro takayoshi American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940 edited by ichiro takayoshi American Literature in Transition, 1940–1950 edited by christopher vials American Literature in Transition, 1950–1960 edited by steven belletto American Literature in Transition, 1960–1970 edited by david wyatt American Literature in Transition, 1970–1980 edited by kirk curnutt American Literature in Transition, 1980–1990 edited by d. quentin miller American Literature in Transition, 1990–2000 edited by stephen j. burn American Literature in Transition, 2000–2010 edited by rachel greenwald smith

AMERICAN LITERATURE IN TRANSITION, 1930–1940

edited by ICHIRO TAKAYOSHI Tufts University

University Printing House, Cambridge cb28bs,UnitedKingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006,USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207,Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025,India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108429382 doi: 10.1017/9781108563895 ©CambridgeUniversityPress2018 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Takayoshi, Ichiro, editor. title: American literature in transition, 1930–1940 / edited by Ichiro Takayoshi. description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, ny : Cambridge University Press, 2018. | Series: American literature in transition | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2018022355 | isbn 9781108429382 (alk. paper) subjects: lcsh: American literature – 20th century – History and criticism. | Literature and society – United States – History – 20th century. classification: lcc ps223 .a44 2018 | ddc 810.9/0052–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018022355 isbn 978-1-108-42938-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Figures page vii Notes on Contributors viii Chronology xiv

Introduction 1 Ichiro Takayoshi

part i themes 25 1 The Middle Class 27 Amy L. Blair 2 Romance, Marriage, and Family 42 Jennifer Haytock 3 The Working Class 56 Joseph B. Entin 4 Sympathy and Poverty 75 John Marsh 5 Black Culture at Home and Abroad 95 Etsuko Taketani 6 The Southern Heritage 112 Michael Kreyling 7 The Literature of Social Protest in California 128 David Wrobel 8 Reckoning with Christianity 153 Jason Stevens 9 Diversity and American Letters 177 Yael Schacher

vi Contents 10 This Land Is Your Land 198 Robert B. Westbrook 11 Look at the World! 229 David Ekbladh, Ichiro Takayoshi

part ii formats 247 12 Bestsellers 249 David Welky 13 Radio Drama 267 Neil Verma 14 Crime Fiction 285 Charles J. Rzepka 15 Documentary Work 303 Jeff Allred 16 Modernism 321 Milton A. Cohen 17 The American Stage 341 Mark Fearnow

part iii institutions 359 18 Federal Writers’ Project 361 Jerrold Hirsch 19 Hollywood 382 William Solomon 20 Time Inc. 403 Donal Harris 21 The Communist Party 421 Christopher Phelps Epilogue: Echoes of the 1930s 436 Morris Dickstein

Index 442

Figures

5.1 The Chicago Negro Unit’s The Swing Mikado (1938). page 101 Federal Theatre Project Collection, Library of Congress 10.1 John Steuart Curry, “Tragic Prelude” (1939). Kansas Historical Society 205 10.2 Walker Evans, “Joe’s Auto Graveyard, Pennsylvania, 1936.” The Museum of Modern Art 210 10.3 Walker Evans, “Alabama Tenant Farmer Family Singing Hymns, 1936.” The Museum of Modern Art 210 10.4 Walker Evans, “Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York, 1931.” The Museum of Modern Art 213 10.5 Walker Evans, “Houses and Billboards in Atlanta, 1936.” The Museum of Modern Art 215 10.6 Walker Evans, “Interior Detail, West Virginia Coal Miner’s House, 1935.” The Museum of Modern Art 221 11.1 Richard Edes Harrison, “The Big Network: How the World Communications System Reaches into the U.S.” (1939). Richard Edes Harrison Collection. Library of Congress 236 15.1 Dorothea Lange, “Indian Woman in a Migratory Labor Contractor’s Camp in California.” Dorothea Lange for the Farm Security Administration, US Department of Agriculture 310 15.2 Jack Delano, “Sharecropper, Georgia.” Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration, US Department of Agriculture 314 15.3 Margaret Bourke-White, Sweetfern, Arkansas, “Poor People Get Passed By.” E. Caldwell and M. B. White, You Have Seen Their Faces (New York: Viking, 1937) 316 21.1 Ben Shahn. A John Reed Club demonstration in Manhattan. Harvard University Art Museum 426

vii

Notes on Contributors

jeff allred is Associate Professor of English at Hunter College, City University of New York, where he has taught since 2005. He is the author of American Modernism and Depression Documentary (2010) and has published articles and reviews on American literature, modernism, digital pedagogy, and new media studies in American Literature, American Literary History, Criticism, Arizona Quarterly, and Transformations. He is currently working on a book project on pedagogy and literary modernism entitled ABC of Modernism. amy l. blair teaches American literature at Marquette University. She is the author of Reading Up: Middle-Class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Early Twentieth-Century United States (2012) and coeditor with James L. Machor of the journal Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History. Her current project investigates middlebrow reading during the 1920s and 1930s and reading advice in Good Housekeeping magazine. milton a. cohen, Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, has published books on cummings, Hemingway, and modernist groups, and on Stevens, Frost, cummings, Williams, and leftist critics in the 1930s. He is presently completing a study of Steinbeck, Hemingway, Richard Wright, and the left in the late 1930s, and is also editing a Norton Critical Edition of E. E. cummings. morris dickstein is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the City University of New York Graduate Center and the author of Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (2009) and Why Not Say What Happened: A Sentimental Education (2015). david ekbladh is Associate Professor of History and Core Faculty in International Relations at Tufts University. His books include Beyond 1917: The United States and the Global Legacies of the Great War (with Thomas Zeiler and Benjamin Montoya, 2017) and The Great American viii

Notes on Contributors ix Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (2010), which won the Stuart L. Bernath Prize of the Society of American Historians and the Phi Alpha Theta Best First Book Award. joseph b. entin is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is the author of Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America (2007), and coeditor, with Franny Nudelman and Sara Blair, of Remaking Reality: U.S. Documentary Culture after 1945 (2018), and, with Robert Rosen and Leonard Vogt, of Controversies in the Classroom: A Radical Teacher Reader (2008). His current research explores narratives of precarious, low-wage labor in contemporary American ﬁction and ﬁlm. mark fearnow writes about theater history and theory. He is the author of The American Stage and the Great Depression (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Clare Boothe Luce (1995), and Theatre and the Good (2007). He has published many articles and chapters focusing on American drama and theater of the twentieth century. He has retired from university teaching and lives in Palm Springs, California. donal harris is the author of On Company Time: American Modernism in the Big Magazines (2016). His work has appeared in PMLA, Modern Language Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other venues. He is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Memphis. jennifer haytock teaches American literature at the College at Brockport, State University of New York. She is the author of At Home, At War: Domesticity and World War I in American Literature (2003), Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism (2008), and The Middle Class in the Great Depression: Popular Women’s Novels of the 1930s (2013). Her essays have appeared in the Hemingway Review, Legacy, and Mosaic. jerrold hirsch, Professor Emeritus of History at Truman State University, is coeditor with Tom Terrill of Such as Us: Southern Voices of the Thirties (1978), a collection of previously unpublished Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) life histories; author of Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project (2003); and coeditor, with Larry Rogers, of America’s Folklorist: B. A. Botkin and American Culture (2010). He has published numerous articles on the FWP, the history of

x Notes on Contributors American folklore studies, oral history, and disability history in journals, chapters in edited books, and introductions to books. He is currently working on a study of the creative folklore and writing projects of the FWP and on a biography of B. A. Botkin. michael kreyling received his PhD from Cornell in 1975 and there- after taught at Mississippi State University, Tulane University, and Vanderbilt, where he retired as Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English in 2015. His early work includes studies of the fiction of Eudora Welty, Eudora Welty’s Achievement of Order (1980) and Figures of the Hero in Southern Narrative (1987). More recently he is the author of The South That Wasn’t There (2010) and A Late Encounter with the Civil War (2014). john marsh is Associate Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University. In addition to numerous articles and reviews, he is the author or editor of You Work Tomorrow: An Anthology of American Labor Poetry, 1929–1941 (2007); Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys: Poverty, Labor, and the Making of Modern American Poetry (2011); Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Poverty (2011); and most recently, In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself (2015). He is at work on a cultural history of the 1930s called “This Dark Hour: The Emotional Life of the Great Depression.” christopher phelps is Associate Professor of American History teaching in the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist (1997; 2nd edn, 2005) and, with Howard Brick, Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War (Cambridge University Press, 2015). charles j. rzepka is Professor of English at Boston University, where he teaches British Romanticism and detective and crime fiction. He is the author of numerous articles in both fields, as well as several books, including Being Cool: The Work of Elmore Leonard (2013)andDetective Fiction (2005). Together with Lee Horsley, he also coedited A Companion to Crime Fiction (2010). His latest essay, “Red and White and Pink All Over: Vacilada, Indian Identity, and Todd Downing’s Queer Response to Modernity,” on the gay, part-Choctaw detective writer of the 1930sTodd Downing, appeared in a special issue of Texas Studies in Literature and Language on the New Modernism in the fall of 2017.

Notes on Contributors xi yael schacher has a BA in English and comparative literature from Columbia University, an MA in history, and a PhD in American studies from Harvard University. She specializes in the literature and history of immigration, on which she has taught courses at the University of Connecticut’s Hartford campus for several years. In 2016 she received a Cromwell Fellowship from the American Society for Legal History to revise her dissertation, “Exceptions to Exclusion: A Prehistory of Asylum in the United States, 1880–1980,” for publication. She will be working on this monograph, among other projects related to migration, displacement, and exile, as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies and The University of Texas at Austin in 2017–18. She served on the editorial board of New Literary History of America (2009) and was a research assistant for Harvard’s digital archives on immigration to the United States. william solomon is Professor of English at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of Literature, Amusement and Technology in the Great Depression (2002) and Slapstick Modernism: Chaplin to Kerouac to Iggy Pop (2016). He has published numerous articles on American literature and ﬁlm in journals such as American Literature, Mosaic, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and Arizona Quarterly. jason stevens has taught at Harvard University and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and he has been a fellow of the National Humanities Center and the University of Pittsburgh, Humanities Center. His work focuses on twentieth-century American literature and US cultural and intellectual history, with emphases on modernism, secularization theory, and Christianity. He is the author of God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America’s Cold War (2010) and the editor of This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home (2015). His writings have also appeared in boundary 2, American Literature, Literature/Film Quarterly, and The Immanent Frame. He is completing a book project on American ﬁlm noir and preparing an additional book on Robert Penn Warren and the rhetoric of prophecy in Southern letters. ichiro takayoshi teaches in the Department of English at Tufts University. His books include American Writers and the Approach of World War II (2015) and American Literature in Transition, 1920–1930 (2017).

xii Notes on Contributors etsuko taketani is Professor of American Literature at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. She is the author of U.S. Women Writers and the Discourses of Colonialism, 1825–1861 (2003) and The Black Pacific Narrative: Geographic Imaginings of Race and Empire between the World Wars (2014). Her current research examines African American literature of the air-atomic age. neil verma is Assistant Professor in Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University. He is the author of Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama (2012), winner of the Best First Book Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. He is coeditor of Anatomy of Sound: Norman Corwin and Media Authorship (2016) and the winner of the Best Moving Image Book Award from the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation. Verma has published on topics ranging from film history to experimental listening and podcast- ing in The Cine-Files, Critical Quarterly, The Journal of American Studies, The Journal of Sonic Studies, RadioDoc Review, Recherches sémiotiques/ Semiotic Inquiry, and The Velvet Light Trap. He is the co-network director for the Radio Preservation Task Force at the Library of Congress, the former special editor at the site Sounding Out!, and the founder of the Great Lakes Association for Sound Studies. He was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago from 2010 to 2014. david welky is Professor of History at the University of Central Arkansas, specializing in twentieth-century American history, the history of film, and the history of popular culture. He is the author of Everything Was Better in America: Print Culture and the Great Depression; The Moguls and the Dictators: Hollywood and the Coming of World War II; A Wretched and Precarious Situation: In Search of the Last Arctic Frontier, and other books. robert b. westbrook is Joseph F. Cunningham Professor of History at the University of Rochester, where he has taught since 1986. He is the author of John Dewey and American Democracy, Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth, and Why We Fought: Forging American Obligations in World War II, as well as many essays and articles on American cultural and intellectual history. david m. wrobel is a native Londoner who came to the United States for graduate school in 1985 and never left. He is the Merrick Chair in Western American History, the David L. Boren Professor, and the Faculty Director of the Western History Collections at the University

Notes on Contributors xiii of Oklahoma, where he teaches courses on the American West, American thought and culture, and John Steinbeck. His books include: America’s West: A History, 1890–1950 (2018), Global West, American Frontier (2013, winner of the Western Heritage Award for nonﬁction), Promised Lands (2002), and The End of American Exceptionalism (1993). He is currently working on “John Steinbeck’s America: A Cultural History, 1930–1968.” He is a past president of the Paciﬁc Coast branch of the American Historical Association and of Phi Alpha Theta, the National History Honor Society, and is a frequent collaborator with K– 12 teachers across the country.

Chronology

1929 Books: Sartoris (William Faulkner), The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner), A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway), Look Homeward, Angel (Thomas Wolfe), Daughter of Earth (Agnes Smedley), Middletown (Robert and Helen Lynd). April. The Gastonia Strike begins. It will be the subject of at least four proletarian novels and two plays. May. The Little Review ceases publication. July. The Dial ceases publication. October. Black Thursday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunges 11 percent. The beginning of the Wall Street Crash. October. Staff members of The New Masses found the John Reed Club. November. The Museum of Modern Art opens. 1930 Books: Jews without Money (Michael Gold), The Woman of Andros (Thornton Wilder), Ash Wednesday (T. S. Eliot), The Bridge (Hart Crane), The 42nd Parallel (John Dos Passos), I’ll Take My Stand (the Southern Agrarians), Cimarron (Edna Ferber), The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett), As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner), Not without Laughter (Langston Hughes), Laughing Boy (Oliver La Farge), Dance Night (Dawn Powell), Exile (Warwick Deeping), Black Manhattan (James Weldon Johnson), Mixed Marriage (Margaret Banning), A Draft of XXX Cantos (Ezra Pound). February. Time Inc. launches Fortune magazine. August. Amos ‘n’ Andy starts broadcasting. October. The ﬁrst “soap opera,” Painted Dreams, debuts on Chicago radio station WGN. October. Ethel Merman makes her Broadway debut in the Gershwin brothers’ musical Girl Crazy. One of her most famous songs is “I Got Rhythm.”

xiv

Chronology xv November. Sinclair Lewis wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. Agnes Smedley crosses paths with Soviet spy Richard Sorge in Shanghai. She introduces him to Hotsumi Ozaki. Deaths: D. H. Lawrence, Herbert Croly, Pauline Hopkins. 1931 Books: Axel’s Castle (Edmund Wilson), Hard Lines (Ogden Nash), The Good Earth (Pearl Buck), Sanctuary (William Faulkner), Black No More (George Schuyler), The Forge (T. S. Stribling), ViVa (e. e. cummings), A White Bird Flying (Bess Streeter Aldrich), American Humor (Constance Rourke), Shadows on the Rock (Willa Cather). February. A special issue of Poetry dedicated to Objectivism appears. February. Dr. Seuss’s ﬁrst book, The Pocket Book of Boners,is released. The term “boner” means a silly mistake. March. “The Star-Spangled Banner,” by Francis Scott Key, is approved by the government as the national anthem. March. Nevada legalizes gambling. April. The trials of the Scottsboro Boys start in Alabama. May. The Empire State Building, the world’s tallest, is opened by President Hoover. October. The Dick Tracy comic strip appears. October. Eugene O’Neill’s trilogy, Mourning Becomes Electra, opens on Broadway. November. H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury quantiﬁes the South’s backwardness in “The Worst American State: Part III.” Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg form the Group Theater. The Group launches the career of Clifford Odets. The exodus of Broadway talent to Hollywood picks up. Deaths: Khalil Gibran, Vachel Lindsay, Bix Beiderbecke. 1932 Books: Death in the Afternoon (Ernest Hemingway), Tobacco Road (Erskine Caldwell), Young Lonigan (James T. Farrell), Guys and Dolls (Damon Runyon), Light in August (William Faulkner), 1919 (John Dos Passos), The Conjure Man Dies (Rudolph Fisher), Infants of the Spring (Wallace Thurman), The Knife of the Times (William Carlos Williams), Sons (Pearl S. Buck), The Fountain (Charles Morgan), Laughing in the Jungle (Louis Adamic), Moral Man and Immoral Society (Reinhold Niebuhr), Southern Road (Sterling Brown).

xvi Chronology March. The infant son of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh is kidnapped. April. Hart Crane kills himself, aged thirty-two. May. William Faulkner arrives in Culver City, California. The beginning of a long captivity in Moviedom. May. Al Capone goes to jail for tax evasion. June. Langston Hughes arrives in Moscow as part of a group of African Americans hired to act in a Soviet ﬁlm about race relations in the American South. The stock market bottoms out. The Dow Jones Industrial Average sinks to 41.22 (down from 381.17 in September 1929). The market doesn’t regain its previous peak until November 1954. November. Franklin Delano Roosevelt defeats incumbent President Hoover. T. S. Eliot returns to the United States to assume the Charles Eliot Norton professorship at Harvard for the 1932–33 academic year. Whittaker Chambers goes underground as a spy for a GRU apparatus. Deaths: Charles Chestnutt. 1933 Books: My Life and Hard Times (James Thurber), The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Gertrude Stein), God’s Little Acre (Erskine Caldwell), Miss Lonely Hearts (Nathanael West), Anthony Adverse (Hervey Allen), Banana Bottom (Claude McKay), The Disinherited (Jack Conroy), Mis-Education of the Negro (Carter G. Woodson), Eimi (e. e. cummings), Hungry Men (Edward Anderson), Unﬁnished Cathedral (T. S. Stribling), Ann Vickers (Sinclair Lewis). January. Adolf Hitler is appointed as Chancellor of Germany. The beginning of the Third Reich. March. FDR is inaugurated. The beginning of the New Deal. May. Book burnings in Germany are carried out by the German Student Union, mainly works by Jewish intellectuals. May. Disney cartoon Three Little Pigs is released. October. Men’s magazine Esquire is founded and thrives, mixing men’s fashion with highbrow literature. Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up and Pietro di Donato’s “Christ in Concrete” originally appear in this magazine.

Chronology xvii November. A strong dust storm takes place in South Dakota. The beginning of the environmental crisis in the “Dust Bowl.” November. Billie Holiday’s recording debut with Benny Goodman, produced by John Hammond. Two recordings: “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law” and “Rifﬁn’ the Scotch.” December. Raymond Chandler debuts in Black Mask. December. Tobacco Road opens on Broadway. It plays for an astonishing 3,182 performances, breaking Broadway records. December. In United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, Judge John M. Woolsey rules James Joyce’s novel is not obscene. December. The Twenty-First Amendment is repealed. The end of Prohibition. Unemployment peaks at 24.9 percent. Albert Einstein takes up a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Deaths: Ring Lardner. 1934 Books: Tender Is the Night (F. Scott Fitzgerald), ABC of Reading (Ezra Pound), Eleven New Cantos: XXXI-XLI (Pound), Tropic of Cancer (Henry Miller), The Thin Man (Dashiell Hammett), The Postman Always Rings Twice (James M. Cain), A Cool Million (Nathanael West), Jonah’s Gourd Vine (Zora Neal Hurston), Appointment in Samarra (John O’Hara), Call It Sleep (Henry Roth), Patterns of Culture (Ruth Benedict), The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (James T. Farrell), It Can Happen Here (Sinclair Lewis), The Last Puritan (George Santayana), The League of Frightened Men (Rex Stout), The Story of a Country Boy (Dawn Powell), Summer in Williamsburg (Daniel Fuchs), Technics and Civilization (Lewis Mumford), After Strange Gods (T. S. Eliot), The Land of Plenty (Robert Cantwell), Heaven Is My Destination (Thornton Wilder), Ladies Go Masked (Margaret Widdemer), Beauty’s Daughter (Kathleen Thompson Norris). January. Following United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, Random House publishes the ﬁrst authorized edition in America. It has 12,000 advance sales. May. A Pravda article hints at a turn in the Communist International (Comintern) policy toward Western democracies. The end of the ultra-left “Third Period” and the beginning of the Popular Front. July. John Dillinger is gunned down in front of the Biograph Theater in Chicago by FBI agents.

xviii Chronology October. Gertrude Stein begins her tour of America. She will return to France in May 1935. October. The Chinese Red Army begins the Long March. November. Lillian Hellman’s first successful play, The Children’s Hour, premieres on Broadway. November. Cole Porter’s musical, Anything Goes, opens on Broadway. “You’re the Top,”“I Get a Kick Out of You.” December. The murder of Sergei Kirov in Leningrad. Stalin uses this as a pretext to launch the Great Purge. The Motion Picture Association of America begins strictly enforcing the Production Code (the so-called Hays Code), which was adopted in 1930. Deaths: Wallace Thurman, Rudolph Fisher. 1935 Books: Tortilla Flat (John Steinbeck), Judgment Day (James T. Farrell), Green Hills of Africa (Ernest Hemingway), The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (William Saroyan), Somebody in Boots (Nelson Algren), Theory of Flight (Muriel Rukeyser), They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (Horace McCoy), no thanks (e. e. cummings), An Early Martyr (William Carlos Williams), Vein of Iron (Ellen Grasgow), Green Light (Lloyd C. Douglas), Selected Poems (Marianne Moore), The Journeyman (Erskine Caldwell), Of Time and the River (Thomas Wolfe), Permanence and Change (Kenneth Burke). January. Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, a play inspired by a 1934 strike of New York City cab drivers, premieres at a benefit for New Theater magazine. February. The Group Theatre produces Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing on Broadway. March. Germany unilaterally declares rearmament. April. The First Congress of the League of American writers is held. The Americanization of Communism. April. The Resettlement Administration (RA), the brainchild of Rexford Tugwell is founded, and is reorganized as the Farm Security Administration in 1937. Its Historical Section (the Photography Section under the FSA) is headed by Roy Stryker. FDR appoints filmmaker Pare Lorentz to the RA, who makes The Plow That Broke the Plain and The River. June. The greatest hitter in the history of baseball, Babe Ruth retires. June. Alcoholics Anonymous is founded in Akron, Ohio.

Chronology xix Summer. A flurry of legislative activities occurs (the Second New Deal): the Social Security Act, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Wagner Act. July. The WPA funds a number of programs that employ writers and artists, such as the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) and the Federal Theater Project. August. Benny Goodman performs for a three-week engage- ment at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles. The beginning of the swing era. August. The Social Security Act is passed. September. The Hoover Dam is dedicated. October. Langston Hughes’s play Mulatto opens on Broadway. October. Italy invades Ethiopia. October. Huey Long is assassinated. October. The Gershwins and DuBose Heyward opera, Porgy and Bess, opens on Broadway. “Summertime,”“I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’,”“It Ain’t Necessarily So.” November. Charles Coughlin founds the National Union for Social Justice. November. F. Scott Fitzgerald moves to Hendersonville, North Carolina, stays at a cheap hotel, and writes “The Crack- Up” while eating canned food and tens of thousands of dollars in debt, with less than 40 cents in cash and a $13 deficit at his bank. Deaths: Charlotte Perkins Gilman. 1936 Books: Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell), Absalom, Absalom! (William Faulkner), The Big Money (John Dos Passos), Black Thunder (Arna Bontemps), Double Indemnity (James M. Cain), We the Living (Ayn Rand), In Dubious Battle (John Steinbeck), How to Win Friends and Influence People (Dale Carnegie), Turn, Magic Wheel (Dawn Powell), Homage to Blenholt (Daniel Fuchs), Ideas of Order (Wallace Stevens), Owl’s Clover (Wallace Stevens), The Surrounded (Darcy McKnickle), Nightwood (Djuna Barnes). April. The opening of the “voodoo” Macbeth at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem, directed by Orson Welles. June. Pope Pius XI issues an encyclical to US bishops entitled “On Motion Pictures.” June–July. James Agee and Walker Evans travel from New York City to Alabama on assignment for Fortune magazine.

xx Chronology July. Ralph Ellison moves from Alabama to New York City. July. The Spanish Civil War starts. August. The Berlin Summer Olympics are held. Jesse Owens wins four gold medals. Hitler refuses to be photographed with him. October. Eugene O’Neill is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Fall. John Steinbeck tours the San Joaquin Valley with Eric H. Thomsen, regional director of the federal migrant camp program, and sees the plight of migrant laborers ﬁrsthand. November. FDR is reelected. November. Henry Luce’s Time Inc. launches Life magazine. December. George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s You Can’t Take It with You premieres on Broadway. December. The United Auto Workers, part of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, begins a sit-down strike at the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan. The fertility rate hits the bottom. 75 per 100,000 women aged 15–44 (93 in 1928). Deaths: Harriet Monroe, Irving Thalberg. 1937 Books: Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck), The Citadel (A. J. Cronin), The Fifth Decad of Cantos (Ezra Pound), To Have and Have Not (Ernest Hemingway), Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston), The Good Society (Walter Lippmann), Red Star over China (Edgar Snow), A Long Way from Home (Claude McKay), Low Company (Daniel Fuchs), Middletown in Transition (Robert and Hellen Lynd), The Man with the Blue Guitar (Wallace Stevens), White Mule (William Carlos Williams), You Have Seen Their Faces (Margaret Bourke- White and Erskine Caldwell), Thieves Like Us (Edward Anderson), Northwest Passage (Kenneth Roberts), And China Has Hands (H. T. Tsiang), The Importance of Living (Lin Yutang), Attitudes toward History (Kenneth Burke), American Stuff: An Anthology of Prose and Verse by Members of the Federal Writers’ Project. April. Archibald MacLeish’s “The Fall of the City” is broadcast over the Columbia Broadcasting System as part of the Columbia Workshop radio series. April. Guernica is bombed. May. The Golden Gate Bridge opens.

Chronology xxi June. The League of American Writers holds its Second Congress. The civil war in Spain is the main concern. June. Valery Chkalov ﬂies nonstop from Moscow, Soviet Union to Vancouver, Washington, US, via the North Pole. June. Theodore Adorno leaves England for New York. July. The Marco Polo Bridge Incident occurs in which Japan invades China proper. July. F. Scott Fitzgerald reports at MGM, $22,000 in debt. November. Musical revue Pins and Needles opens on Broadway. The cast are all members of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. An unexpected hit, it runs for 1,108 performances. FDR prematurely tries to balance the budget. The Roosevelt Recession ensues. Deaths: George Gershwin, H. P. Lovecraft, Edith Wharton, Don Marquis. 1938 Books: In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (Delmore Schwartz), The Coming Victory of Democracy (Thomas Mann), Homage to Catalonia (George Orwell), The Late George Apley (John P. Marquand), Uncle Tom’s Children (Richard Wright), The Happy Island (Dawn Powell), I Should Have Stayed Home (Horace McCoy), Life along the Passaic (William Carlos Williams), All This, and Heaven Too (Rachel Field), My America (Louis Adamic), The World’s Body (John Crow Ransom), Understanding Poetry (Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren), The Hill Grows Steeper (Fannie Cook). February. Thornton Wilder’s Our Town opens on Broadway. July. The Justice Department begins antitrust proceedings against Hollywood studios. The beginning of the end of the studio system. October. The Munich Crisis. October. Archibald MacLeish’s radio drama “Air Raid” is broadcast. October. Orson Welles’s radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds is broadcast in The Mercury Theatre on the Air series. October. Pearl S. Buck wins the Nobel Prize in Literature. November. Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” is sung by Kate Smith on her radio show on Armistice Day. Whittaker Chambers breaks with the Communist Party and goes into hiding with his family.

xxii Chronology Deaths: James Weldon Johnson, Thomas Wolfe, Arthur Schomburg. 1939 Books: Tropic of Capricorn (Henry Miller), The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck), The Big Sleep (Raymond Chandler), The Day of the Locust (Nathanael West), Let Me Breathe Thunder (William Attaway), Drums at Dusk (Arna Bontemps), Ask the Dust (John Fante), Moses, Man of the Mountain (Zora Neale Hurston), Finnegans Wake (James Joyce), Pale Horse, Pale Rider (Katherine Anne Porter), Johnny Got His Gun (Dalton Trumbo), U.S. 1: Poems (Muriel Rukeyser), The New England Mind (Perry Miller), The Idea of a Christian Society (T. S. Eliot), Knowledge for What? (Robert Lynd), Factories in the Field (Carey McWilliams), Moment in Peking (Lin Yutang), Christ in Concrete (Pietro di Donato), An American Exodus (Dorothy Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor), Kitty Foyle (Christopher Morley), Career by Proxy (Faith Baldwin), The Main Stream (Hilda Morris). January. W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood emigrate together to America. March. The Anschluss, the German annexation of Austria, takes place. March. T. S. Eliot’s Family Reunion opens at the Westminster Theatre, London. April. Norman Corwin’s radio drama “They Fly through the Air with the Greatest of Ease” is broadcast. April. The New York World’s Fair opens in Queens, NY. The Fair will draw 45 million paid visitors in the next two years. April. Marian Anderson sings at the Lincoln Memorial. April. Ezra Pound sails for the United States, convinced that he will stop American involvement in the approaching war. June. The League of American Writers holds its Third Congress. August. The Nazi–Soviet Pact is signed. The fatal blow to the Popular Front. August. Albert Einstein meets with FDR and discusses an A- bomb possibility. September. Germany invades Poland. The beginning of World War II in Europe. A banner year on Broadway: Abe Lincoln in Illinois (Robert Sherwood), The Philadelphia Story (Philip Barry), The Little

Chronology xxiii Foxes (Lillian Hellman), The Man Who Came to Dinner (Kaufman and Hart), TheTimeofYourLife(William Saroyan). A banner year in Hollywood: The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Wuthering Heights, Ninotchka. Simon & Schuster starts its paperback division, Pocket Books, revolutionizing the publishing industry. Congress ends funding for the FWP. Thomas Mann emigrates to the United States. Deaths: Sigmund Freud, W. B. Yeats, S. S. Van Dine (Willard Huntington Wright), Havelock Ellis, Zane Grey, Heywood Broun, Sidney Howard. 1940 Books: Native Son (Richard Wright), For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway), Cantos LXII-LXXI (Ezra Pound), The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Carson McCullers), To the Finland Station (Edmund Wilson), Sapphira and the Slave (Willa Cather), Farewell, My Lovely (Raymond Chandler), How to Read a Book (Mortimer J. Adler), My Name Is Aram (William Saroyan), Angels on Toast (Dawn Powell), Harlem: Negro Metropolis (Claude McKay), 50 Poems (e. e. cummings), In the Money (William Carlos Williams), From Many Lands (Louis Adamic). February. Woody Guthrie writes “This Land Is Your Land,” the antiwar rejoinder to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” April. Robert Sherwood’s interventionist play, There Shall Be No Night, opens on Broadway and wins Sherwood his third Pulitzer Prize. August. Varian Fry arrives in Marseilles. He will smuggle out anti-Nazi intellectuals and artists, including Marc Chagall, André Breton, Max Ernst, and Hannah Arendt. October. Louis Adamic launches the Common Ground magazine. September. Congress passes the ﬁrst peacetime conscription bill. November. FDR is reelected, becoming the ﬁrst man to hold the presidency for three terms. Deaths: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, Marcus Garvey. 1941 Books: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (James Agee, Walker Evans), Twelve Million Black Voices (Richard Wright), The Last

xxiv Chronology Tycoon (F. Scott Fitzgerald), What Makes Sammy Run (Budd Schulberg), The Ground We Stand On (John Dos Passos), American Renaissance (F. O. Matthiessen), A Leaf in the Storm (Lin Yutang), The New Criticism (John Crow Ransom), Philosophy of Literary Form (Kenneth Burke). January. FDR gives his “Four Freedoms” speech. January. From Rome, Ezra Pound starts broadcasting a see- mingly incoherent medley of economic analysis, political com- mentary, and literary divagations. February. Henry Luce declares that his country owns the twentieth century. “The American Century” appears in Life. June. Germany invades the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. September. Melvin Tolson’s “Dark Symphony” appears in Atlantic Monthly. September. Walter Benjamin kills himself in Portbou, Spain. He was on his way to the United States, reading Herman Melville to brush up on his English. December. The Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. The United States enters World War II.