The Literature of Extreme Poverty in the Great Depression

The Literature of Extreme Poverty in the Great Depression uncovers a forgotten side of modernism: the literature of unemployment and poverty in the 1930s, particularly fiction and poetry about people starving on the street or struggling on welfare, people who often don't know where they'll find their next meal 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.
Parker 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.

Robert Dale Parker is the Frank Hodgins Professor of American Literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He has published two books on Faulkner and a book on Elizabeth Bishop as well as The Invention of Native American Literature, The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930, and, from Oxford University Press, How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies.

1. Introduction: The Poetics of the Stiff

2. A Poetics of the Great Depression: Style and Aesthetics in Tom Kromer's Waiting for Nothing

3. How to Make a Queer: The Erotics of Begging; or, Down and Out in the Great Depression

4. A Collage of Breadlines and Restaurants: Waiting for Nothing and the Reinvention of Time

5. Hungry a Long Time: Poverty and the Great Depression in the Early Poetry of Langston Hughes

6. Life on Relief in the Short Fiction of Dorothy West and Martha Gellhorn

7. Conclusion: Depression Poverty and American Literary Studies

Notes

Works Cited

Acknowledgments