ABSTRACT
The contrast between 1920s high Modernism and the 1930s, an age that demanded anything except self-involved art, was striking, and gave some observers reason to think that Modernism might be over. As Haytock creates her definition of 1930s literature, she notes, Literature of the Great Depression engages the American Dream possibly more and more directly than literature of any other decade. Difficult as it is to imagine the intensity of prejudice against Jewish people during the 1930s, Michael Gold's Jews without money traces the way anti-semiticism corrupted opportunities for both work and education. Described in the mildest possible of terms, United States residents immigrant and native were crushed by not only their own existing poverty, but by the ongoing threat of increasing financial difficulties. In Halper's descriptive choices, he changes the simplified remedy for lifting the poverty of the Depression that a person finds work to the heart-rending consequences of having to adjust to work that neither satisfies nor provides.
