Trouble On The Land: Southern Literature and the Great Depression

TheCanadian Review of American Studies, Volume 10,Number 2, Fall, 1979 TroubleOn The Land: Southern Literature and the Great Depression Louis D. Rubin, Jr. It is a painful thing sometimes to read history books that are written for children, and to realize the view of the past that is being given them. Recently I happened upon Volume 14 of the American Heritage New Illustrated History of the United States. It was subtitled The Roosevelt Era. The author ofVolume 14provides his young readers with ayear-by-yearchronicleforthe 1930's.I quote from the section for the year 1935: Dunng the year, Technicolor came to the movie screen, and the WPA Federal Arts Project came to the aid of hungry artists, many of whom had a built-in predilection for the "Ash Can School" of painting - stark slum scenes being a favorite subject. Plays expressed the same preoccupation with social messages in this period .... In the world offiction, William Faulkner was gaining worldwide praise for his naturalistic novets portraying for the most part sordid slices of low-class life in the South. Within this realm, Erskine Caldwell had recently contnbuted Tobacco Road. The third book of James Farrell's Studs Lanigan trilogy appeared in 1935, looking at squalor further north, in Chicago .... It saddens me to think that this is the picture that today's young readers will receiveof William Faulkner, and of Southern literature for the period. For the 1930'swere the high point, the culmination, of the South's literary history, and relativelyfew of the books written by Southern authors during the period had much to do with "sordid slices of low-class life." From roughly the coming of the Great Depression up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Southern literary renascence was at perihelion. A roll call is inorder. Faulkner published The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absaloml and The Hamlet. Thomas Wolfe published 154 Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Look Homeward, Angel, OJTime and the River and two posthumouslyedited novels. Robert Penn Warren published his first book of poems and his first novel. Gone with the Wind came, was read and then seen on film, and has endured. Caldwell published Tobacco Road, God's Little Acre and other novels; until censorship standards were relaxed in the 1950's they were unsurpassed as popular pornography. Carson McCullers published The HeartIsa Lonely Hunter. Katherine Anne Porter published almost all of her best work. Allen Tate wrote most of his best poems and his novel, The Fathers. Eudora Welty's first book, A Curtain of Green, was published. James Agee published his first two books. Richard Wright wrote the stories in Uncle Tom's Children. In drama, Lillian Hellman did most of her best work. And so on. From the standpoint of what is now almost a half-century's perspective, it does seem undeniable that a disproportionate share of the more impressive literature by Americans during the Depression years was written by Southern authors. Yet not only is there only a moderate amount of "sordid slicesof low-class life" included in that literature, but the truth is that most of it does not importantly concern itself with what many of our historians and critics still seem to believe was the major and almost the sole literary theme of the period: Social Consciousness, as manifested in exposes of capitalistic society, sympathetic delineation of the downtrodden, depictions of class struggle, etc. There are, of course, exceptions; but mostly that sort of thing was not what seems to have kindled the literary imagination in the South of the l930's. Now I trust that nobody needs to be reminded that if this is so, itis certainly not because the Southern states were in any way exempt from the consequences of the debacle of 1929 that in the Northeast sent most of the intellectuals off to the Finland Station. "It is my conviction," President Roosevelt declared in 1938, "that the South presents right now ... the Nation's No. I economic problem." The Depression brought widespread joblessness and deprivation. The region had for many decades lagged behind the remainder of the country in all the relevant economic indices...