How the Great Depression affected literature

The Great Depression is one of the most hopeless periods in the history of the United States, but along with this one cannot overlook the impact it had on American literature.

When the stock market crashed in October 1929 and the precarious material prosperity of the twenties triggered mass unemployment, the crisis spurred many American writers into action. After a decade of literary experimentation from such modernists as Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Eliot, a new wave of writers began to draw inspiration from the political and economic spheres.

At a time when the Communist Party seemed a powerful engine of progress, these writers saw capitalist America as only a dying society in dire need of revolutionary change. Never before, much less now, have so many of America’s greatest writers paid such close attention to the working class.

In 2008, the United States suffered its worst economic crisis since 1929. The new crisis has caused deep economic recession, unemployment, financial instability, and political gridlock: all these effects seem to echo back to the Great Depression, which devastated the country, albeit in a less violent way.

Narrative Techniques

Journalist George Packer of The New Yorker has observed that recent times of crisis have not managed to have such an important impact on the literary current, unlike at the beginning of the last century. In his book, The Unwinding, the journalist uses the techniques of the 1930s to describe our times, and it is perhaps the only one of the few works that comes even close to the masterpieces of the Great Depression.

So what was so special about the writers of those times? What knowledge about poverty and politics, literature and society can the writers of the 1930s share with us? In this series, we will look at the following Depression-era classics-John Dos Passos, Big Money, and John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath-and try to figure out what these works have in common with today’s realities.

It is much easier to spot a financial bubble after it bursts than while it is inflating. Ever since the financial crisis erupted in 2008, it has been commonplace for many experts to emphasize the warning signs that had spread over the previous decade: the steady rise in home prices, reckless mortgages, the manipulation of rates for quick profits – all becoming easy prey for post-crisis moralists.

Then came the collapse of Wall Street in 1929. It was no secret that in the 1920s the stock market achieved unprecedented influence on life in America as a whole. The ever-increasing standard of living made millions of Americans into real investors, which led to the “tumultuous 20s. The glittering parties of Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby were made possible by easy money, which seemed to be available anywhere. But once the crisis hit, the ’20s didn’t feel like an era of prosperity, but rather a prolonged drinking spree that necessarily ended with a heavy hangover. So there is hardly a more successful work than John Dos Passos’s Big Money, which clearly delineates the silhouette of pre-crisis America. This book was published in 1936, when the Depression was in its seventh year.

“Big Money” is the third work included in John Dos Passos’s “USA” trilogy, which is essentially the epitome of American society in the early 20th century. Although characters from previous volumes appear in “Big Money,” the work also reads well as a stand-alone book. The title vividly conveys the cold irony of the entire book. Big Money is what everyone was looking for in the 1920s and many seemed to manage to find, thereby elevating wealth to a kind of golden fleece on whose altar all the values of American society have been sacrificed.

A crude juxtaposition

Obviously, Dos Passos wanted to be something more to his readers than a mere fiction maker. “Big Money” is on a certain plane, alternating between straightforward fictional narrative and several kinds of documentary prose, and the writing techniques were borrowed from the cinematic art of the time. The section of the book entitled “News of the Day” resembles typical newspaper headlines, song excerpts, and press announcements. Using crude juxtapositions, Dos Passos resorts to introducing this kind of chronicle to describe a world losing control: murder and gossip, the anxieties and unrest of workers pile on the reader in an endless stream.

In a section entitled “Camera Obscura,” Dos Passos uses prose devoid of punctuation, thereby attempting to recreate the characteristic scenes of the period. One such scene is the political execution of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, with this accompanying text: “They have built the electric chair and hired the executioner to throw the switch all right we are two nations America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws…”

Perhaps one of Dos Passos’ most striking textual embellishments is his peculiar way of presenting celebrity biographies. In particular, he resorts to two polar categories. Creators and intellectuals such as the dancer Isadora Duncan and the sociologist Thorsten Veblen are depicted as exiles in America, having lost the respect of their countrymen, having to struggle with the poverty and alienation of others.

In contrast, they are portrayed as the great tycoons Henry Ford and William Randolph Hearst. While Dos Passos admires their energy and accomplishments, he does not shy away from portraying them as imperfect men whose personal fears and neuroses have a detrimental effect on society. Ford is also a tragic figure. He starts out as a decent inventor and craftsman, but fate has prepared for him the role of a paranoid billionaire surrounded by guards and private detectives hired to protect him from the anger of his own employees.

Through these examples, Dos Passos tries to convey the idea that big money is a terrible curse: once you make big money, you can never enjoy it.

American Addiction

The three fictional characters who form the basis of the work “Big Money” certainly have their real-life protégés. The first of them, Charlie Anderson, a pilot who has been to the fronts of World War I, we first meet on a ship arriving home from France. Charlie is also an inventor, hatching the idea of an improved engine for airplanes. He teams up with a few acquaintances to pursue it, and, after a brief period of poverty, one fine morning he wakes up as a real rich man. This is a vivid example of how the principle of capitalism should function.

Dos Passos makes it clear that good intentions and hard work alone are not enough to succeed in modern America. You have to have your own capital, and money is Wall Street, which was the beginning of Charlie’s downfall. After a series of shenanigans, he realizes that he has sold out his partners in preference to larger businesses, from which he too was eventually driven out. Abandoning his only passion, true handiwork, he concludes that his entire existence is a vacuum that can only be filled with lust and booze.

Stock trading becomes a real addiction, not just for Charlie, but for the whole country.

One of the many women Charlie met along the way was Margo Dowling, a young beautiful actress whose life credo was simply to find rich men. If Charlie’s story tells of the power of money in the representation of ’20s America, Margot’s story embodies another idolatry: the need to be famous. Despite significant obstacles — her father was a drunkard and her stepfather tried to rape her — she eventually becomes a Hollywood star. But inside, she remains self-serving and soulless. Not only is she not one of the best people, she is also a mediocre actress. As Dos Passos argues, the lust for fame goes along with merit and achievement. It is a typical lottery in which the winners are no better than the losers, and often the opposite.

The only character in the work that commands the reader’s respect is Mary French. She was the daughter of a Colorado doctor who devoted herself to the care of the poor. Dos Passos paints her life in grim colors: she falls in love and loses a man, works hard and is tempted by alcohol. Deeply convinced of the tenets of the class struggle, she clings to her raison d’être unlike the other characters in the book. Her suffering, unlike Charlie and Margot, is the result of self-sacrifice, not selfishness.

Dos Passos also observes a repetition of the situation of the twenties in the next decade. Even in those frivolous years there were violent worker resistance, and Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. America’s entire capitalist system in Big Money is rooted in the unstable soil of greed, speculation, celebrity worship, and political oppression. And then comes the moment when the system begins to work. In the wake of the collapse, the writers of the Great Depression emerge, destined to lead readers through the ruins and demand radical change.