Working, Class, and Literature

In the essay, "Never Give an Inch," in Tin House, Gerald Howard brilliantly discusses the working class in American literature.

From the piece...

As a result, the thirties became, in fiction, very much a star search for the writer of impeccable working-class credentials or at least the proper political point of view, the one who could produce the great proletarian novel, a much desired work of revolutionary struggle and ideological awakening. The critical arbiters of taste were all waiting for Lefty, and even Ivy League scribes were putting on proletarian airs, striding the picket lines and haring off to the Appalachians to report on the latest coal miners’ strike. But little of this work, by such dusty names as Agnes Smedley (Daughter of Earth), Jack Conroy (The Disinherited), Mike Pell (S.S. Utah), Mary Heaton Vorse (Strike!), and Grace Lumpkin (To Make My Bread), is read today, marred as it is by formulaic plots and a hectoring political tone. Of the fiction from this period dealing with the plight of the working class, only the novels of John Steinbeck are still widely read. Jews Without Money by Mike Gold, the critical bullyboy of The New Masses, survives as a portrait of Lower East Side Jewish tenement life; James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy serves similarly for the Irish of Chicago. Both Edward Dahlberg’s Bottom Dogs, praised by Edmund Wilson as “a work of literature that has the stamp of a real and original gift,” and Edward Anderson’s Hungry Men offer vividly rendered portraits of American life at the economic margins unmarred by agitprop and can also be read with profit today.

And then work, at least of the physical sort, and working people pretty much disappear from American fiction for the next three decades or so. Why? We can point to the long stretch of postwar prosperity that moved millions of Americans into the middle class and off the farms and assembly lines, while bringing a measure of security and affluence to those who remained. Literary fashion played its part, as serious American fiction became more inward looking, concerned with the problems of the individual rather than those of society. Nothing remotely like the rise of the so-called Angry Young Men, an eruption of literary voices from the working class in England, occurred in this country, in part because England has a thicker working-class culture with deeper historical roots, and even more so because our working class did not have that much to be angry about, protected as it was by a still-vibrant labor movement.

Most crucially, though, the whole concept of class came to be seen as almost a choice rather than a fate, as the powerful mechanisms of the meritocracy and the vastly expanded opportunities for higher education placed millions of Americans on the escalator of social mobility. Rightly celebrated as a great democratic achievement, this development nevertheless had some downsides that only became apparent with time.