ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the literary strategies of two journalists, John L. Spivak and Meridel Le Sueur, during the Great Depression. Reading Spivak and Le Sueur within the context of the period’s theories of reportage, especially as articulated by New Masses editor Joseph North, it illuminates the role of 1930s proletarian reportage in the development of American literary journalism. It also explores the genre’s potential roots in two seemingly incompatible nineteenth-century literary precursors: French naturalism, as seen in Émile Zola’s detached observation of objective fact, and American romanticism, as seen in Walt Whitman’s heightened sense of subjective feeling. The social relationship established between the narrator-reporter, the subject, and the reader in representative examples of 1930s reportage suggests that the subjective turn can be understood, in line with other mass movements of the era, as an embrace of the collective. In the face of crisis and widespread suffering, 1930s reportage offered readers a new sense of social responsibility and a new subjectivity—an expansive identity rooted not in individualism but in communal values.
