Journalist

Literature during the Great Depression

    When the stock market crashed in October 1929 and the hectic prosperity of the 1920’s gave way to mass unemployment, the crisis energized American writers. After a decade in which the literary experiments of the Modernists dominated the scene, a new wave of writers began to look to politics and economics for inspiration.

The Mighty Miss Malone

by Christopher Paul Curtis

     The Mighty Miss Malone is the story of Deza, the smartest girl in her class in Gary, Indiana, singled out by teachers for a special path in life. When her beloved father leaves to find work, Deza, Mother, and her older brother Jimmie go in search of him, and end up in a Hooverville outside Flint, Michigan. The twists and turns of their story reveal the devastation of the Depression and prove that Deza truly is the Mighty Miss Malone.

Of Mice and Men

by John Steinbeck

    They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of lonelinss and alienation.

Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own. When they land jobs on a ranch in the Salinas Valley, the fulfillment of their dream seems to be within their grasp. But even George cannot guard Lennie from the provocations of a flirtatious woman, nor predict the consequences of Lennie's unswerving obedience to the things George taught him.

The Grapes of Wrath

by John Steinbeck

        Tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads-driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity.

A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America.

John Steinbeck’s relations to the Great Depression:

   As John Steinbeck was developing as a writer, events taking place in the United States provided him with plenty of material to write about. In October 1929 the U.S. stock market crashed, sparking the Great Depression. Banks collapsed. Businesses closed. By 1933, a quarter of the population was unemployed. Then environmental catastrophe struck as well. From 1930 to 1936, severe drought plagued the Great Plains of the American Midwest, which at the time were mostly farmland. The drought killed crops, and with no plants to hold down the soil, the dry dirt swirled up into suffocating dust storms when the winds kicked in. The entire region became known as the Dust Bowl. The Oklahoma panhandle was the hardest hit. Farmers' crops were destroyed, and with nothing to sell many lost their homes and farms. They were forced to migrate in search of work. Men who had once been their own bosses were now forced to work for wages on other people's farms, often in exploitative conditions. 


Articles:

Roosevelt’s Address:

On March 4, 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inagurated as the thiry second President of the United States. In his famous inagural address, President Roosevelt outlined his “ New Deal” –an expansion of the federal govermetns as an instrument of employment opportunity and welafare.

The National Industry Recovery Act:

     The National Industry Recovery Act, passed by congress in June 1933. The act established a set of economic regulations aimed at restoring economic stability in the wake of the stock market crash. In addition, the act extended additional benefits to working people, including the right to form and join unions and to bargain with employers over work-related issues.