on the return of the thirties. In the spring of 1935, the famous novelist Maxwell Bodenheim crashed the New York City welfare office and begged for relief after five years of the Great Depression. His career had stalled, and Bodenheim hadn’t earned a dime since his final novels had flopped. He was working on a manuscript called Clear Deep Fusion, but he would never finish it. His visit to the relief office was his last stand before he was edited out of literary history.
The New York Herald Tribune mocked Bodenheim’s ragged demonstration: “he wore high shoes without laces, his shirt was dirty and the rest of his clothes needed cleaning and pressing. He was unshaven, very pale and his hair was mussed.” He brought along five Writers Union activists and a squad of reporters in an effort to inspire other writers to go public with their struggles to survive. One activist waved a sign that read “starvation standards of Home Relief make real ghost writers.” During the thirties, the rate of newspaper closings rose to 48 percent and magazine advertising plunged 30 percent. Publishers Weekly noted book production had been slashed from nearly 211 million to 154 million books during that period: 57 million books evaporated into thin air.
I’m just old enough to remember the Great Depression. After the first few years, by the mid-1930s — although the situation was objectively much harsher than it is today — nevertheless, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that ‘we’re gonna get out of it,’ even among unemployed people, including a lot of my relatives, a sense that ‘it will get better.’
[…]
It’s quite different now. For many people in the United States, there’s a kind of pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it’s quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis.
Noam Chomsky releases an Occupy pamphlet of analysis of the global movement and advice on how to protest intelligently (via explore-blog)
Americans don’t like to dwell on failure. As soon as the economic crisis passed, literary scholars abandoned these novels from the 1930s … we keep these Sad Men buried in the literary rubbish heap, despite the fact we need their stories now more than ever—because nobody builds monuments to failed men.
My “Sad Men” essay, where my book about writers and the Great Depression began…
Trapped inside Amazon’s low price prison, publishers channeled MacGyver and cobbled together a temporary fix out of duct tape, a Swiss Army knife and Apple’s brand new iPad.
To everyone’s surprise this ramshackle solution survived two years and changed the eBook landscape forever.
This wasn’t the first time the industry needed a quick and dirty price fix. During the Great Depression, publishers faced off against another seemingly invincible retail juggernaut: Macy’s Department Stores.
LIVE poetry event featuring Poet Laureate Philip Levine, 2012 Pulitzer Prize Winner Tracy K. Smith, and two fantastic poets from the Tumblr community: Saeed Jones and Karolina Manko.
This Monday, April 23, 7 pm, at Housing Works Bookstore in NYC. Open bar. Amazing poetry. Poet Laureate. Pulitzer Prize Winner. Poets from the Tumblr community. Put it on your calendar and come out to celebrate poetry with us!
New York Newspaper Guild members recently held that quiet protest outside of the Page One meeting at the New York Times. The Great Recession and digital shift have rocked employees, and the Guild members are still fighting for a new contract.
Newspaper protests weren’t always so quiet.
While researching my book, I discovered Edward Newhouse’s bombastic coverage The Newark Ledger newspaper strike. The action began in November 1934 when 45 reporters and editors walked out of the office. The union hired a professional sound truck, a van cruising up and down the streets of Newark, blasting the reporters’ demands.
Throughout the Great Depression, department stores like Macy’s sold books at a massive discount. The bestselling Gone with the Wind became an early casualty in the 1930s price wars. Department stores priced the new novel at 89-cents, hoping to lure customers into stores—a sneaky loss leader strategy.
More recently, Amazon used eBooks the same way. They would sell digital books at a steep discount, but they would hook a generation of readers on the Kindle platform.
To the wider intellectual and literary world, he was the voice of the despair and pessimism they were all feeling in 1938, as the Depression dragged on and they saw the rising tide of Nazism and Fascism on one hand, while the Soviet Union fell into its own brand of genocidal barbarism on the other, and a cataclysmic war loomed. No one was more of a pessimist than Delmore Schwartz. Even the high praise he was receiving from all quarters — from T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Vladimir Nabokov — depressed him; he worried that it was premature and he’d flame out early. Even his marriage to Gertrude Buckman, whom he’d pursued and with whom he’d argued for a few years, into which they both entered with reluctant foreboding, was instantly disappointing to them both. Only when surrounded by fellow writers whom he liked and respected, drinking too much, did he momentarily brighten up.
Abe Books has posted gorgeous book covers from bestsellers of the Great Depression, a peek at the books the publishing industry depended on during this difficult decade.
Check it out: “Many of the most popular novels offered an escape from the worries of the time such as the 1934 bestseller Anthony Adverse, which depicts a globetrotting adventurer, or the feel good story of Goodbye, Mr. Chips in which boarding school teacher Mr. Chipping overcomes shyness and his initial inability to connect with his students to become an inspiring educator … many of these novels are out-of-print and largely forgotten.”
The New York Observerreported: “HarperCollins employees expressed love for their jobs but dismay at the prospect of no more guaranteed raises, reduced seniority protections, restrictions on vacation time, higher health care costs and shortened maternity leave. These concerns have resulted in a standoff between HarperCollins’s management and UAW Local 2110 that is now almost a year old.”
In 1934, Dashiell Hammett, Edward Newhouse and nine other authors joined brave employees on the picket line outside Macaulay Company publishing house—reportedly, the first publishing house strike in America.
In the early 20th Century, Napoleon Hill interviewed thousands of successful people. In 1937, he distilled their stories into Think and Grow Rich—a handbook for getting wealthy as the country struggled to emerge from the Great Depression. 70 million copies of the book have been sold since the 1930s.
Blogger Mike Cane has beenwriting about Hill, and uncovered that vintage book ad at the Library of Congress through the Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library.
The poet and novelist Vincent McHugh joined the New York City Federal Writers Project as a technical editor in November 1936. The 32-year-old novelist only drank milkshakes, trying to settle some mysterious stomach aliment.
McHugh wrote the magnificent introduction to New York Panorama, “The Metropolis and Her Children.” I’ve reprinted the whole essay below—an ambitious trip through the history, culture, technology and statistics of 1930s New York City. That Depression-era photograph of a pretzel vendor was included in the book as well.
In his most sweeping passage, McHugh mentioned the works of Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and many other epochal writers, but he ended with a perfect note, putting the city’s workers straight into the fabric of our literary history, treating workers not as subjects or metaphors, but as writers, the men and women writing the city, writing a way out of the Great Depression.
Welcome to Sad Men, the official blog for my upcoming book about how New York City writers survived the Great Depression.
Next spring, OR Books will publish my first book, a hardboiled history about how ten different writers coped with economic catastrophe in the 1930s. The writers include: Edward Newhouse, Maxwell Bodenheim, May Swenson and Richard Wright.
“[Martin Amis] is almost as enthusiastic about PacMan [as he is about Space Invaders], although you get the sense that he sees it (in contrast to Space Invaders) as a fundamentally unserious endeavor. “Those cute little PacMen with their special nicknames, that dinky signature tune, the dot-munching Lemon that goes whackawhackawhackawhacka: the machine has an air of childish whimsicality.” His advice is to concentrate stolidly on the central business of dot-munching, and not to get distracted by the shallow glamor of the fruits: “Do I take risks in order to gobble up the fruit symbol in the middle of the screen? I do not, and neither should you. Like the fat and harmless saucer in Missile Command (q.v.), the fruit symbol is there simply to tempt you into hubristic sorties. Bag it.””
The Plow That Broke the Plains hit theaters around the country in 1936. The Resettlement Administration commissioned the director Pare Lorentz to shoot a film about the Dust Bowl storms that destroyed miles of farmland in the Great Plains.
The Encyclopedia of the Great Plains explained: “[It] was shown in independent theaters, school auditoriums, and other public meeting places throughout the country. It was seen by 10 million people in 1937 alone and would become one of the most widely viewed films in American history.”
The film inspired a number of Great Depression-era works, including Muriel Rukeyser’s documentary poem, “Book of the Dead.” You can read more about her life and work in my upcoming book.
In the spring of 1935, the famous novelist Maxwell Bodenheim crashed the New York City welfare office and begged for relief after five years of the Great Depression. His career had stalled, and Bodenheim hadn’t earned a dime since his final novels had flopped. He was working on a manuscript called Clear Deep Fusion, but he would never finish it. His visit to the relief office was his last stand before he was edited out of literary history.
Will Amazon destroy the publishing industry? 
Abe Books has posted gorgeous book covers from 
Welcome to Sad Men, the official blog for my upcoming book about how New York City writers survived the Great Depression.