industry, spending his wages on the pleasures of the moment. Left broke and jobless by the crash, he returns to Monkey Nest Camp, works in construction, and ultimately discovers his solidarity with all other workers:
I could no longer withdraw into my fantastic inner world and despise these men. I did not aspire to be a doctor or a lawyer any more. I was only as high or as low as the other workers in the paving gang.
In the book's climactic scene, farmers organized by Larry's German World War I veteran friend Hans force a foreclosed farm and its contents to be sold back to the farmer for pennies. And Larry, having led a group of town men to support the farmers, makes a speech in cadences recognized by an old-timer as those of Larry's union- leader father. Having thus reclaimed or reconstructed the cultural heritage of his class, Larry goes off with Hans into the unromantic world of union organizing.
The most popular novel to capture Depression America on the road was, of course, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939). -342- Steinbeck's novel, while it points toward a more humane future, is in many ways also an exercise in nostalgia. For its center of value remains a kind of 'agrarian utopia' (Warren Susman's term), maintained in the limbo of an idealized encampment by New Deal social policy. And its concept of breaking out of selfish individualism, dramatized in the famous scene of Rose of Sharon sharing her breast milk, involves incorporating outsiders into the more or less traditional family. But in many novels like those I have been discussing, and in 1930s America, it is precisely the disintegration of the family under the stresses of exploitation and the Depression that forces marginalized men and women onto the road.
Books like The Disinherited and the poems, stories, and 'reportage' published in The Anvil and in other magazines (Left Front, Leftward, New Force, Dynamo, The Cauldron, Partisan Review) mainly begun in the early 1930s in connection with the Communist Party's John Reed Clubs represent an important part of the American response to the idea that a revolutionary working class should produce its own writers and artists. In the context of the postrevolutionary Soviet Union, there were those who saw little point in burdening a newly self-conscious proletariat with the decayed culture of Russia's aristocratic and bourgeois past. Rather, they believed, workers should be organized into what amounted to literary study groups within which, through practice and criticism, they would learn to develop an art true to their own experiences and needs and integral to their everyday lives. The resulting 'Proletcult' had, by 1920, become a mass movement, with a membership (between 300,000 and 450,000) perhaps as large as that of the Soviet Communist Party itself. The subsequent heeling of the movement under Party control, the later debates over the validity of the idea of a proletarian culture (notably if problematically engaged in Trotsky's Literature and Revolution), the intricacies of organizational infighting in the Soviet Union and elsewhere throughout the twenties and thirties, and the emergence of the idea that literary content and ideas should be directed by the policies of a proletarian 'vanguard party' do not concern us here, except to the extent that these developments help to explain the growing disrepute of the idea itself.
In the United States, however, Mike Gold in particular continued throughout the twenties to push this idea of proletarian culture; ul-343- timately in 1928 he succeeded in turning The New Masses into what Eric Homberger has accurately described as 'a Proletcult magazine.' In this phase the magazine received numerous submissions from working people like Jack Conroy, H. H. Lewis, Herman Spector, and Edwin Rolfe. And while, in 1930, The New Masses was turned back to better-known — and, perhaps, less gritty and more middle-class — contributors, it had helped lay the groundwork for the success of the John Reed Clubs and of their magazines. These were the fertile grounds from which sprang important novelists like Richard Wright and Tillie Olsen, and which encouraged many other young workingclass writers like Conroy. Such institutional supports are critical to the development of a culture rooted in working-class experience.
Many of the men and women who joined the John Reed Clubs were working on novels, but ultimately few were published. In part, the shorter forms of poetry and story were obviously easier to complete for people with full-time work and family commitments. In part, too, the Communist Party's 1934 decision (as part of its movement toward 'popular front' politics) to eliminate the John Reed Clubs in favor of a League of American Writers constituted by more traditional, better-known, and largely middle-class authors shortcircuited the slow development of a militantly working-class literary culture, and helped condemn at least some of the emerging writers to what Tillie Olsen has eloquently termed 'silences.'
It may be, however, that the central problem was the novel itself. For how could the novel, which emerged with the development of capitalism and which, as a form, privileges 'the position that individual destiny occupies in capitalist culture' (Christian Suggs's words), be reshaped to envision the emergence of a collective future implicit in proletarian politics? Suggs goes on to point out that 'the novel's unique ability to focus for considerable numbers of pages on the most internalized processes of the mind and soul could have the collateral effect of isolating private sensibility from public identity' and consequently undermining the political purposes of proletarian fiction. The essentially autobiographical fictions I have been describing found it difficult to evade this dilemma. On the other hand, experimental efforts to decenter the narrative from one single hero, like Robert Cantwell's The Land of Plenty (1934), William Rollins's The-344- Shadow Before (1934), and Clara Weatherwax's Marching! Marching! (1935), ran the risk of losing a mass audience more accustomed to straightforward stories.
In fact, the variety of technical experiments would be surprising if one took too seriously critical strictures enforcing realism. Many efforts were influenced by John Dos Passos's techniques, especially multiple narrative centers, in his trilogy U.S.A. (1930, 1932, 1936), and behind him very likely the 'unanimist' fictional tactics of Jules Romains. In Union Square (1933), Albert Halper provides a kind of sociological cross section of the variety of human beings who work, live, engage in politics, and hang out in and around the Square. In A Time to Remember (1936), Leane Zugsmith interweaves a series of stories about the lives of department store workers who become caught up in a strike. Robert Cantwell begins The Land of Plenty 'Suddenly the lights went out.' We are in the head of Carl, the foreman; subsequent chapters pick up that same moment from the perspectives of Hagen, Marie, and others in the factory, and then in the town. Weatherwax uses a wider, if generally less well-controlled, set of devices: one chapter of Marching! Marching! consists of what are presented as clippings, ads, and strike bulletins; the text moves without signal from narration to internal monologue and from the head of one character to another; the narrative of a strike meeting is suspended for six pages to describe the lumber operations in which one man works. In her trilogy of the Trexler family, Josephine Herbst places brief vignettes, out of chronological sequence, between the chapters of her main narratives. Like Dos Passos's 'Newsreels,' though different in form, these are mainly efforts to capture a sense of American public life as it converges with the 'private' experience of the autobiographical Victoria Wendel. It is true that an insistent, and sometimes one-dimensional, naturalism constituted the mainstream of proletarian fictional technique through the 1930s. It is also true that some of the anti-Stalinist writers gathered around Partisan Review were more committed than others to sustaining the legacies of 1920s modernism. But as these examples suggest, the interest in modernist techniques was widespread; indeed, Marcus Klein presents proletarian literature as 'a literary rebellion within [the] literary revolution' called modernism. However that might be, it is essential, I -345- think, to understand how such sophisticated later works as those of Tillie Olsen are grounded in these efforts to use modernist experimental tactics to reconfigure the novel to proletarian social purposes.
Proletarianism takes yet a different shape when it intersects with race. While Conroy's protagonist sought community within the framework of Midwestern radical traditions, Claude McKay's central figures looked toward the values of the African diaspora to counteract the disintegration and anomie of Western culture. McKay, a black Jamaican by birth and a published poet of dialect verse before he immigrated to the United States in 1912, became well known in Left and Bohemian circles in post-World War INew York as an editor of The Liberator (successor to The Masses) and writer of both lyric and militant verse in generally traditional forms like the sonnet. In London during 1920 he worked as a journalist on Sylvia Pankhurst's working-class feminist newspaper, Worker's Dreadnaught, and in 1922 he visited the Soviet Union. There he published an account of race relations in the United States (The Negroes in America [1923]) and a collection of fiction whose nature is expressed in its title, Trial by Lynching (1925). In France, beginning in 1923, McKay set out to establish himself
