2 - The Search for “Culture” as a Form of Commitment

Summary

Political commitment found expression in explorations of the national mood such as Louis Adamic’s My America (1938), Sherwood Anderson’s Puzzled America (1935), Nathan Asch’s The Road: In Search of America (1939), Theodore Dreiser’s Tragic America (1932), and Edmund Wilson’s American Jitters (1932). It found expression in explicitly proletarian writing that Granville Hicks and others collected in Proletarian Literature in the United States (1935). It found expression in numerous “radical” novels – many of them autobiographical and all of them more fervently felt than rigorously “proletarian” – including Nelson Algren’s Somebody in Boots (1935), Thomas Bell’s Out of This Furnace (1941), Robert Cantwell’s Land of Plenty (1934), Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited (1933), Edward Dahlberg’s Bottom Dogs (1930), Daniel Fuchs’s Summer in Williamsburg (1934), Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money (1930), Albert Maltz’s The Underground Stream (1940), Tess Slesinger’s The Unpossessed (1934), and Clara Weatherman’s Marching! Marching! (1935). And it found expression in a vast “documentary literature”: films, recordings, and paintings as well as books about the lives, mores, and values of “the people” that culminated in a series of striking collaborations between writers and photographers, including James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941); Sherwood Anderson’s Home Town (1940), for which Edwin Rosskam selected Farm Security Administration photographs; Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces (1937); Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor’s An American Exodus (1939); Archibald MacLeish’s Land of the Free (1938), which used FSA photographs; and Richard Wright’s Twelve Million Black Voices (1941), for which Edwin Rosskam again selected FSA photographs.