Making It New: 1900–1945 319contemporary problems in the politicization of poetry and the aestheticizing of
politics and, eventually, in commitment to fascism. Others, like William Carlos
Williams, tried to take the measure of the times in hard, spare distillations of the urban
scene. While many of the traditionalists, notably those in the South, became even
more intent on celebrating the values of an earlier, inherited American culture – a
system at once prior and superior to the contemporary confusions of capitalism – as
a means of staving off what they saw as the otherwise inevitable triumph of socialist
revolution. There were “proletarian novels” – books, that is, written by working-class
people – such as The Disinherited (1933) by Jack Conroy (1899–1980). There were
novels of protest like The Land of Plenty (1934) by Robert Cantwell (1908–1978),
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, or three novels dealing with a strike that
took place in the textile mills of North Carolina: To Make My Bread (1932) by Grace
Lumpkin (1893–1980), Call Home the Heart (1932) by Fielding Burke (Olive Tilford
Dargan) (1869–1968), and Beyond Desire (1932) by Sherwood Anderson. There was
fiction exploring the plight of dispossessed urban minorities, such as Call It Sleep
(1934) by Henry Roth (1906–2000) or Native Son by Richard Wright. Writers like F.
Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway tried to secrete an aware-
ness of contemporary problems into their narratives: Fitzgerald did so in Tender is
the Night and Faulkner and Hemingway in, respectively, The Wild Palms and To H a v e
and Have Not. Others turned directly to the techniques of journalism or documen-
tary to make their point as, say, James Agee (1909–1955) did in his account of three
poor Southern tenant-farming families, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). A
sense of apocalypse or annunciation, which had always come relatively easy to
American writers, now became even more pronounced. Apocalypse, for example,
feelings of nightmare and catastrophe, are all clearly there in books like The Day of
the Locust by Nathanael West, while Hart Crane’s epic poem The Bridge is, to some
extent, one long annunciatory act.
There is no simple way of summing up the artistic response to crisis: crisis in
general, that is, or the specific crisis encountered by the American people between
the two world wars. It certainly encouraged a different cultural milieu. Writers on
the right, like Allen Tate, wrote enthusiastically of the imminent “destruction of the
middle-class–capitalist hegemony, and the restoration ... of traditional society.”
Writers on the left, like Jack Conroy, wrote of the general need for socialism and a
classless society, and the need for the contemporary writer, in particular, to pursue
“social understanding, which is the life of revolutionary prose.” Communist Party
intellectuals, in turn, like Michael Gold, developed theories of “proletarian realism”
based on Marxist theories, or what they termed “the higher sphere of dialectical
development of character.” Accompanying such enthusiasm, there was fear of what
might happen if crisis did not engender the right kind of change; although, naturally,
writers disagreed about what they feared just as much as they did about what they
desired. Those to the right, like the Southerner John Peale Bishop (1892–1940),
wrote of the urgent imperative to resist “some American form of communism”;
otherwise, he lamented, “with us Western civilization ends.” Those inclining to the
left, on the other hand, like Lillian Hellman and Dorothy Parker – as well as ErnestGGray_c04.indd 319ray_c 04 .indd 319 8 8/1/2011 7:53:45 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 45 AM