Sad Men

The First Publishing House Strike

Tue, 14 May 2013 07:23:00 -0400

Amazon employees in Germany have mounted a strike against the online retailer. Today is a good day to remember other strikes in publishing history…

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.

My upcoming book will follow the saga of this strike, but I wanted to share the list of demands that the strikers offered in 1934. It serves as a reminder of how far we’ve come in workers’ rights over the 20th Century and what we need to protect in the future.

The Macaulay Strike Demands

1. All abuse and tyranny on the part of the employers must stop.

2. Employees must be permitted the use of sufficient electric light.

3. The installation of electric fans in warm weather.

4. Employees absent because of illness for a period up to ten days should receive full pay.

5. No discharge without either two weeks’ notice or one week’s salary.

6. Workers employed by the company for a year or longer should receive two week’s vacation.

Newspaper reporters staged a historic strike during this same period. Here’s more about that collective action:

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.

(Photo via Library of Congress)

Will Writers Get a Federal Bailout?

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 13:01:00 -0400

The Federal Government has stepped in to save banks, and the automobile industry, but where are they on the important subject of books? Or, if the answer is state and local government, where are they? Is any state doing anything? Why are there no impassioned editorials in influential newspapers or magazines? Who will save our books? Our libraries? Our bookstores?

—James Patterson in a New York Times Book Review advertisement.

Above, a poster from Iowa : WPA Federal Art Project between 1936 and 1939.

Pitch Letter for 'Sad Men'

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:11:00 -0400

I’m writing about nonfiction book query letters on GalleyCat, and I realized that it is very hard to find sample query letters online.

To help other writers, here is a copy of my query letter that eventually became this book project…

Sad Men will recreate the seven most miserable years ever faced by American writers. My dramatic history will begin during the long winter of 1933, following a crew of ruined literary luminaries, burnt-out pulp fiction scribes, and future Federal Writers Project employees. The book will conclude in 1939 as a controversial federal bailout sent writers back to work and the World’s Fair revived the city. Readers will discover some uncanny similarities to our recession, but my book will ultimately remind us that our literary ancestors have been here before—and they survived.

I’ll tell the stories of a bestselling author peddling poems in Washington Square Park, an alcoholic poet preaching revolution in radical verse, and an unemployed reporter bumming around a shantytown in Central Park. My book will also follow a few pulp fiction masters, populating the Depression-era landscape with H.P. Lovecraft’s monsters, Dashiell Hammett’s detectives, and Buck Rogers’ space ships. Finally, my book will focus on the unique disaster of the Federal Writers Project (FWP), a bureaucratic beehive that employed more than 600 writers in highly combustible workplace, including brilliant authors like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and John Cheever.

I’ve already written three essays about New York City writers and the Great Depression: “Bohemian Rhapsody” for The Believer, “And Wow He Died As Wow He Lived” for Poetry Foundation, and “Sad Men” for Wabash Magazine.

If you are interested, I would love to send you a copy of my proposal and a sample chapter. Thank you for your time and consideration.

How New York City Writers Survived the Great Depression

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 07:23:00 -0500

Welcome to Sad Men, the official blog for my upcoming book about how New York City writers survived the Great Depression.

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.

On this site, I am building an archive of free eBooks, Spotify playlists, photographs, videos, and poems from the literary world of the Great Depression.

Email me for pre-order updates.

Awesome cover for Sarah Weinman’s new...

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 11:31:36 -0500

Awesome cover for Sarah Weinman’s new anthology…

offonatangent:

Get ready for TROUBLED DAUGHTERS, TWISTED WIVES: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense, edited by Sarah Weinman, coming from Penguin Books on August 27.

Abyss of the Birds

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 13:19:00 -0500

This year marked the 72nd anniversary of the debut of Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time,” a gorgeous cycle of chamber music first performed in a German prison camp during World War Two.

I have been lost in “Abyss of the Birds,” a mournful seven-minute clarinet solo that sounds like a songbird lost in the frozen darkness of a January night. The composer described his own piece: “Clarinet alone. The abyss is Time with its sadness, its weariness. The birds are the opposite to time, They are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant Songs.”

The melody must leave the clarinet player dizzy from its long passages, stretching the loveliest notes for seemingly endless measures. In the best recordings you can hear the clarinetist gulping for air.

No matter where you live, the clarinet makes for great writing music, a sad and slow tune that emerged from the hell-hole of World War Two.

Alex Ross described this magnificent series at The New Yorker:

The title does not exaggerate the ambitions of the piece. An inscription in the score supplies a catastrophic image from the Book of Revelation: “In homage to the Angel of the Apocalypse, who lifts his hand toward heaven, saying, ‘There shall be time no longer.’” It is, however, the gentlest apocalypse imaginable … [there] are episodes of transfixing serenity—in particular, two “Louanges,” or songs of praise. Each has a drawn-out string melody over pulsing piano chords; each builds toward a luminous climax and then vanishes into silence. The first is marked “infinitely slow”; the second, “tender, ecstatic.” Beyond that, words fail.

To celebrate the anniversary, I’m reading For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet. by Rebecca Rischin. She dispelled many myths about this monumental work, bringing to life a cast of amazing musicians making music in one of the most terrible places on earth.

Great collection of WPA art… theparisreview: Melville...

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 13:20:05 -0500

Great collection of WPA art…

theparisreview:

Melville House has a terrific slideshow of WPA Posters about books and reading. (The Library of Congress has even more!) The art is inspiring enough; the sentiments behind it, even more so. A few of our favorites.

Writing Advice from H. P. Lovecraft

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 07:23:00 -0400

Years before blogs, digital self-publishing or even ‘zines, the great horror author H.P. Lovecraft helped lead the United Amateur Press Association for many years (including the Great Depression).

The association published The United Amateur, a collection of writings by members. Lovecraft also wrote a long column for magazine, analyzing different essays, poems and stories written by members—aggregating in the same spirit as contemporary literary bloggers.

You can download a free copy of Lovecraft’s Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 over at Project Gutenberg. Below, I’ve reprinted a copy of an essay Lovecraft wrote for the magazine, sharing writing advice for members. After nearly a century, his advice still holds up.

Literary Composition by H. P. Lovecraft

Published in The United Amateur (January 1920)

In a former article our readers have been shewn the fundamental sources of literary inspiration, and the leading prerequisites to expression. It remains to furnish hints concerning expression itself; its forms, customs, and technicalities, in order that the young writer may lose nothing of force or charm in presenting his ideas to the public.

Grammar

A review of the elements of English grammar would be foreign to the purpose of this department. The subject is one taught in all common schools, and may be presumed to be understood by every aspirant to authorship. It is necessary, however, to caution the beginner to keep a reliable grammar and dictionary always beside him, that he may avoid in his compositions the frequent errors which imperceptibly corrupt even the purest ordinary speech. As a general rule, it is well to give close critical scrutiny to all colloquial phrases and expressions of doubtful parsing, as well as to all words and usages which have a strained or unfamiliar sound. The human memory is not to be trusted too far, and most minds harbour a considerable number of slight linguistic faults and inelegancies picked up from random discourse or from the pages of newspapers, magazines, and popular modern books.

Types of Mistakes

Most of the mistakes of young authors, aside from those gross violations of syntax which ordinary education corrects, may perhaps be enumerated as follows.

(1) Erroneous plurals of nouns, as vallies or echos.

(2) Barbarous compound nouns, as viewpoint or upkeep.

(3) Want of correspondence in number between noun and verb where the two are widely separated or the construction involved.

(4) Ambiguous use of pronouns.

(5) Erroneous case of pronouns, as whom for who, and vice versa, or phrases like “between you and I,” or “Let we who are loyal, act promptly.”

(6) Erroneous use of shall and will, and of other auxiliary verbs.

(7) Use of intransitive for transitive verbs, as “he was graduated from college,” or vice versa, as “he ingratiated with the tyrant.”

(8) Use of nouns for verbs, as “he motored to Boston,” or “he voiced a protest.”

(9) Errors in moods and tenses of verbs, as “If I was he, I should do otherwise,” or “He said the earth was round.”

(10) The split infinitive, as “to calmly glide.”

(11) The erroneous perfect infinitive, as “Last week I expected to have met you.”

(12) False verb-forms, as “I pled with him.”

(13) Use of like for as, as “I strive to write like Pope wrote.”

(14) Misuse of prepositions, as “The gift was bestowed to an unworthy object,” or “The gold was divided between the five men.”

(15) The superfluous conjunction, as “I wish for you to do this.”

(16) Use of words in wrong senses, as “The book greatly intrigued me,” “Leave me take this,” “He was obsessed with the idea,” or “He is a meticulous writer.”

(17) Erroneous use of non-Anglicised foreign forms, as “a strange phenomena,” or “two stratas of clouds.”

(18) Use of false or unauthorized words, as burglarize or supremest.

(19) Errors of taste, including vulgarisms, pompousness, repetition, vagueness, ambiguousness, colloquialism, bathos, bombast, pleonasm, tautology, harshness, mixed metaphor, and every sort of rhetorical awkwardness.

(20) Errors of spelling and punctuation, and confusion of forms such as that which leads many to place an apostrophe in the possessive pronoun its.

Of all blunders, there is hardly one which might not be avoided through diligent study of simple textbooks on grammar and rhetoric, intelligent perusal of the best authors, and care and forethought in composition. Almost no excuse exists for their persistent occurrence, since the sources of correction are so numerous and so available. Many of the popular manuals of good English are extremely useful, especially to persons whose reading is not as yet extensive; but such works sometimes err in being too pedantically precise and formal. For correct writing, the cultivation of patience and mental accuracy is essential. Throughout the young author’s period of apprenticeship, he must keep reliable dictionaries and textbooks at his elbow; eschewing as far as possible that hasty extemporaneous manner of writing which is the privilege of more advanced students. He must take no popular usage for granted, nor must he ever hesitate, in case of doubt, to fall back on the authority of his books.

Reading

No aspiring author should content himself with a mere acquisition of technical rules. As Mrs. Renshaw remarked in the preceding article, “Impression should ever precede and be stronger than expression.” All attempts at gaining literary polish must begin with judicious reading, and the learner must never cease to hold this phase uppermost. In many cases, the usage of good authors will be found a more effective guide than any amount of precept. A page of Addison or of Irving will teach more of style than a whole manual of rules, whilst a story of Poe’s will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook. Let every student read unceasingly the best writers, guided by the admirable Reading Table which has adorned the UNITED AMATEUR during the past two years.

It is also important that cheaper types of reading, if hitherto followed, be dropped. Popular magazines inculcate a careless and deplorable style which is hard to unlearn, and which impedes the acquisition of a purer style. If such things must be read, let them be skimmed over as lightly as possible. An excellent habit to cultivate is the analytical study of the King James Bible. For simple yet rich and forceful English, this masterly production is hard to equal; and even though its Saxon vocabulary and poetic rhythm be unsuited to general composition, it is an invaluable model for writers on quaint or imaginative themes. Lord Dunsany, perhaps the greatest living prose artist, derived nearly all of his stylistic tendencies from the Scriptures; and the contemporary critic Boyd points out very acutely the loss sustained by most Catholic Irish writers through their unfamiliarity with the historic volume and its traditions.

Vocabulary

One superlatively important effect of wide reading is the enlargement of vocabulary which always accompanies it. The average student is gravely impeded by the narrow range of words from which he must choose, and he soon discovers that in long compositions he cannot avoid monotony. In reading, the novice should note the varied mode of expression practiced by good authors, and should keep in his mind for future use the many appropriate synonymes he encounters. Never should an unfamiliar word be passed over without elucidation; for with a little conscientious research we may each day add to our conquests in the realm of philology, and become more and more ready for graceful independent expression.

But in enlarging the vocabulary, we must beware lest we misuse our new possessions. We must remember that there are fine distinctions betwixt apparently similar words, and that language must ever be selected with intelligent care. As the learned Dr. Blair points out in his Lectures, “Hardly in any language are there two words that convey precisely the same idea; a person thoroughly conversant in the propriety of language will always be able to observe something that distinguishes them.”

Elemental Phases

Before considering the various formal classes of composition, it is well to note certain elements common to them all. Upon analysis, every piece of writing will be found to contain one or more of the following basic principles: Description, or an account of the appearance of things; Narration, or an account of the actions of things; Exposition, which defines and explains with precision and lucidity; Argument, which discovers truth and rejects error; and Persuasion, which urges to certain thoughts or acts. The first two are the bases of fiction; the third didactic, scientific, historical and editorial writings. The fourth and fifth are mostly employed in conjunction with the third, in scientific, philosophical, and partisan literature. All these principles, however, are usually mingled with one another. The work of fiction may have its scientific, historical, or argumentative side; whilst the textbook or treatise may be embellished with descriptions and anecdotes.

Description

Description, in order to be effective, calls upon two mental qualities; observation and discrimination. Many descriptions depend for their vividness upon the accurate reproduction of details; others upon the judicious selection of salient, typical, or significant points.[121]

One cannot be too careful in the selection of adjectives for descriptions. Words or compounds which describe precisely, and which convey exactly the right suggestions to the mind of the reader, are essential. As an example, let us consider the following list of epithets applicable to a fountain, taken from Richard Green Parker’s admirable work on composition.

Crystal, gushing, rustling, silver, gently-gliding, parting, pearly, weeping, bubbling, gurgling, chiding, clear, grass-fringed, moss-fringed, pebble-paved, verdant, sacred, grass-margined, moss-margined, trickling, soft, dew-sprinkled, fast-flowing, delicate, delicious, clean, straggling, dancing, vaulting, deep-embosomed, leaping, murmuring, muttering, whispering, prattling, twaddling, swelling, sweet-rolling, gently-flowing, rising, sparkling, flowing, frothy, dew-distilling, dew-born, exhaustless, inexhaustible, never-decreasing, never-failing, heaven-born, earth-born, deep-divulging, drought-dispelling, thirst-allaying, refreshing, soul-refreshing, earth-refreshing, laving, lavish, plant-nourishing.

For the purpose of securing epithets at once accurate and felicitous, the young author should familiarize himself thoroughly with the general aspect and phenomena of Nature, as well as with the ideas and associations which these things produce in the human mind.

Descriptions may be of objects, of places, of animals, and of persons. The complete description of an object may be said to consist of the following elements:

1. When, where, and how seen; when made or found; how affected by time.

2. History and traditional associations.

3. Substance and manner of origin.

4. Size, shape, and appearance.

5. Analogies with similar objects.

6. Sensations produced by contemplating it.

7. Its purpose or function.

8. Its effects—the results of its existence.

Descriptions of places must of course vary with the type of the place. Of natural scenery, the following elements are notable:

1. How beheld—at dawn, noon, evening, or night; by starlight or moonlight.

2. Natural features—flat or hilly; barren or thickly grown; kind of vegetation; trees, mountains, and rivers.

3. Works of man—cultivation, edifices, bridges; modifications of scenery produced by man.

4. Inhabitants and other forms of animal life.

5. Local customs and traditions.

6. Sounds—of water; forest; leaves; birds; barnyards; human beings; machinery.

7. View—prospect on every side, and the place itself as seen from afar.

8. Analogies to other scenes, especially famous scenes.

9. History and associations.

10. Sensations produced by contemplating it.

Descriptions of animals may be analyzed thus:

1. Species and size.

2. Covering.

3. Parts.

4. Abode.

5. Characteristics and habits.

6. Food.

7. Utility or harmfulness.

8. History and associations.

Descriptions of persons can be infinitely varied. Sometimes a single felicitous touch brings out the whole type and character, as when the modern author Leonard Merrick hints at shabby gentility by mentioning the combination of a frock coat with the trousers of a tweed suit. Suggestion is very powerful in this field, especially when mental qualities are to be delineated. Treatment should vary with the author’s object; whether to portray a mere personified idea, or to give a quasi photographic view, mental and physical, of some vividly living character. In a general description, the following elements may be found:

1. Appearance, stature, complexion, proportions, features.

2. Most conspicuous feature.

3. Expression.

4. Grace or ugliness.

5. Attire—nature, taste, quality.

6. Habits, attainments, graces, or awkwardnesses.

7. Character—moral and intellectual—place in the community.

8. Notable special qualities.

In considering the preceding synopses, the reader must remember that they are only suggestions, and not for literal use. The extent of any description is to be determined by its place in the composition; by taste and fitness. It should be added, that in fiction description must not be carried to excess. A plethora of it leads to dulness, so that it must ever be balanced by a brisk flow of Narration, which we are about to consider.

Narration

Narration is an account of action, or of successive events, either real or imagined; and is therefore the basis both of[122] history and of fiction. To be felicitous and successful, it demands an intelligent exercise of taste and discrimination; salient points must be selected, and the order of time and of circumstances must be well maintained. It is deemed wisest in most cases to give narratives a climactic form; leading from lesser to greater events, and culminating in that chief incident upon which the story is primarily founded, or which makes the other parts important through its own importance. This principle, of course, cannot be literally followed in all historical and biographical narratives.

Fictional Narration

The essential point of fictional narration is plot, which may be defined as a sequence of incidents designed to awaken the reader’s interest and curiosity as to the result. Plots may be simple or complex; but suspense, and climactic progress from one incident to another, are essential. Every incident in a fictional work should have some bearing on the climax or denouement, and any denouement which is not the inevitable result of the preceding incidents is awkward and unliterary. No formal course in fiction-writing can equal a close and observant perusal of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce. In these masterpieces one may find that unbroken sequence and linkage of incident and result which mark the ideal tale. Observe how, in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” each separate event foreshadows and leads up to the tremendous catastrophe and its hideous suggestion. Poe was an absolute master of the mechanics of his craft. Observe also how Bierce can attain the most stirring denouements from a few simple happenings; denouements which develop purely from these preceding circumstances.

In fictional narration, verisimilitude is absolutely essential. A story must be consistent and must contain no event glaringly removed from the usual order of things, unless that event is the main incident, and is approached with the most careful preparation. In real life, odd and erratic things do occasionally happen; but they are out of place in an ordinary story, since fiction is a sort of idealization of the average. Development should be as lifelike as possible, and a weak, trickling conclusion should be assiduously avoided. The end of a story must be stronger rather than weaker than the beginning; since it is the end which contains the denouement or culmination, and which will leave the strongest impression upon the reader. It would not be amiss for the novice to write the last paragraph of his story first, once a synopsis of the plot has been carefully prepared—as it always should be. In this way he will be able to concentrate his freshest mental vigour upon the most important part of his narrative; and if any changes be later found needful, they can easily be made. In no part of a narrative should a grand or emphatic thought or passage be followed by one of tame or prosaic quality. This is anticlimax, and exposes a writer to much ridicule. Notice the absurd effect of the following couplet—which was, however, written by no less a person than Waller:

“Under the tropic is our language spoke, And part of Flanders hath receiv’d our yoke.”

Unity, Mass, Coherence

In developing a theme, whether descriptive or narrative, it is necessary that three structural qualities be present: Unity, Mass, and Coherence. Unity is that principle whereby every part of a composition must have some bearing on the central theme. It is the principle which excludes all extraneous matter, and demands that all threads converge toward the climax. Classical violations of Unity may be found in the episodes of Homer and other epic poets of antiquity, as well as in the digressions of Fielding and other celebrated novelists; but no beginner should venture to emulate such liberties. Unity is the quality we have lately noted and praised in Poe and Bierce.

Mass is that principle which requires the more important parts of a composition to occupy correspondingly important places in the whole composition, the paragraph, and the sentence. It is that law of taste which insists that emphasis be placed where emphasis is due, and is most strikingly embodied in the previously mentioned necessity for an emphatic ending. According to this law, the end of a composition is its most important part, with the beginning next in importance.

Coherence is that principle which groups related parts together and keeps unrelated parts removed from one another. It applies, like Mass, to the whole composition,[123] the paragraph, or the sentence. It demands that kindred events be narrated without interruption, effect following cause in a steady flow.

Forms of Composition

Few writers succeed equally in all the various branches of literature. Each type of thought has its own particular form of expression, based on natural appropriateness; and the average author tends to settle into that form which best fits his particular personality. Many, however, follow more than one form; and some writers change from one form to another as advancing years produce alterations in their mental processes or points of view.

It is well, in the interests of breadth and discipline, for the beginner to exercise himself to some degree in every form of literary art. He may thus discover that which best fits his mind, and develop hitherto unsuspected potentialities.

Thin Man Martini

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 18:44:00 -0400

During the deepest moments of the Great Depression, Dashiell Hammett published The Thin Man. The 1934 novel was a satirical and introspective detective story, the plot pickled with booze.

While watching the The Thin Man film this summer, I tried to adapt a martini for the book. Guided by this Lost Past Remembered blog post, I modified the 1930s staple into an easy drink. Try it out below…

Thin Man Martini

In a mixing glass, combine:

two and a half ounces of gin
a half ounce of dry vermouth
six to eight ice cubes

Let the mixture sit while you cut a lemon in half and peel an artsy-craftsy-looking lemon peel (just the yellow skin, not the white stuff underneath).

Then squeeze three drops of lemon juice into your glass. Add three drops of bitters. Then use the lemon peel to coat the inside of the glass with the lemon juice and bitters.

Stir the mixing glass for 30 seconds. Strain into your glass, leaving the lemon peel inside.

If you want more literary cocktails, check out Studio 360s Fuzzy Novel winners.

What the Great Depression Can Teach Us About Amazon

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 19:23:00 -0400

Will Amazon destroy the publishing industry? History says no…

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.

In the mid-1930s, New York State passed a Fair Trade Law that forced all booksellers to offer a new book at the same price. Gone with the Wind’s price had dipped to 89-cents at some stores.

When publishers set the new price at $3 (equivalent to $47 in 2011), Macy’s promptly returned 36,000 copies of the novel to Macmillan. The publisher grudgingly accepted the returns, telling the New York Times: “we believe … that, with the price of Gone with the Wind stabilized, its sale will go right on.”

So here we are in 2012. We still read Gone with the Wind and the publishing industry survived the Great Depression. We don’t have a Fair Trade Law anymore, but the major publishers negotiated an agency model for eBook prices—forcing eBook stores to sell new titles for the same price.

The Department of Justice is currently investigating that model. Both the agency model and the Fair Trade Law were temporary measures to navigate a difficult transition period for the publishing industry. The publishing industry survived department stores and the Great Depression. It will survive Amazon as well.

Zora Neale Hurston Sings the Blues

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 07:42:00 -0400

During the Great Depression, the novelist Zora Neale Hurston traveled from Harlem to Florida to record folk songs for the Federal Writers Project’s Florida Folklife archive.

She left behind 18 amazing recordings, telling the story of individual folk songs and singing many of the tunes herself. I’ve linked to all the recordings below…

Follow this MP3 link to listen to her sing “Halimuhfack.” Here’s more about the recording: “A ‘jook’ song, learned on the East coast of Florida. After the song, Zora Neale Hurston describes how she collects and learns songs (including those she has published).”

Here is the complete collection (MP3 links from the Library of Congress):

1.Crow Dance

2.Dat Old Black Gal

3.Description of lining track

4.Evalina

5.Georgia Skin

6.Gonna See My Long-Haired Babe

7.Halimuhfack

8.Let the Deal Go Down

9.Let’s Shake It

10.Mama Don’t Want No Peas, No Rice

11.Mule on the Mount

12.Oh Mr. Brown

13.Oh, the Buford Boat Done Come

14.Po’ Gal

15.Shove It Over

16.Tilly, Lend Me Your Pigeon

17.Uncle Bud

18.Wake Up, Jacob

Follow this link to read a free eBook copy of Three Plays: Lawing and Jawing; Forty Yards; Woofing by Zora Neale Hurston.

(Via David A. Taylor’s Soul of a People)

OR Books will publish my first book, exploring how writers can learn from the Great Depression. My hardboiled history will tell the story of how New York City writers survived both the Great Depression and our current Great Recession.

On this site, I am building a giant archive of free eBooks, Spotify playlists, photographs, videos, and poems from the literary world of the Great Depression.

Why I Write Letters

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 07:23:00 -0400

Way back in December 2000, Peace Corps stationed me on top of a cold mountain in Guatemala. During my first night in the village of Miramundo, I stared into the foggy darkness outside the wood shack where I would live for two years, feeling like I had stumbled upon the edge of the world.

My old girlfriend had mailed me a letter with a photograph and a copy of Radiohead’s Kid A CD. I switched on my battered Discman and savored that new album for a week. At night, I would swaddle myself in a blanket with her letter, letting those spooky synthesizers and Thom Yorke’s voice whoosh through my head.

That memory contains so many obsolete technologies: a compact disc, a portable CD player, printed photograph and a handwritten letter. One decade later, I can stream Kid A through my laptop, transcribe my writing notebook entries into my iPad and post the essay on my Tumblr blog. As I wrote about authors in the 1930s, I found myself writing letters again—getting back into the old habit that they took for granted.

Until this year, pens, stationery and printed photographs were no longer part of my life. I stopped writing letters in 2004, the same time I wrote my first blog posts. As I joined a generation of bloggers, my writing life focused on word-count, links and speed. My brain shifted from uneven scribbles on a sheet of paper to a machine with automatic spell check and the power to publish online instantly.

But what did I lose? I haven’t huddled under the blankets with a letter in so many years and I can’t remember the last time I listened to an album all the way through. Your brain changes when you stop scribbling your thoughts to another person with pen and paper. I lost touch with the messy joy of those Peace Corps letters, replacing it with spare and straight-to-business email prose. If I discovered something wonderful before blogs and social networks, I would write a sprawling letter intended for a single reader.

After a few years of blogging at GalleyCat, the entire dynamic shifted. I stripped the “I” out of my prose, quickly describing the world in snatches of blog-friendly prose. Twitter condensed my style even more, trimming my thoughts to 140-character bursts. Instead of writing for a single reader, I’m floating miniature sentences into the digital sea. How do you write letters?

I write them on blank white sheets of Mead Plain Writing Tablet paper (the perfect balance between onion-skin stationery and hardier regular paper stock) and mail my letters in vintage airmail envelopes with red white and blue checkered corners. These barber-pole striped envelopes jump out of a handful of junk mail.

I like to write each letter in a ballpoint sprint, keeping my pen on the paper until I’ve filled up both sides of the 6x9 inch paper with my careening handwriting. I generally avoid paragraph breaks, letting the stories and news blend together into a single dizzying thought. It is messy and takes a little bit of effort to read, but the experience of writing one of those letters feels like a spring cleaning inside my head, sharing everything I wanted to share with that particular friend in a twenty-minute writing marathon.

Unbuckled from the focus of a tweet on Twitter or the direct simplicity of a blog post, I write like that lonesome 23-year-old kid on top of a mountain in Guatemala. Don’t get me wrong. I wrote this essay to publish on the Internet and I my writing life will always be centered online. I’ve been posting to GalleyCat by day and writing letters by night.

In college, I made the jaw-dropping discovery that one of my middle school pen pals had sublet an apartment with my best friend. I would visit their house every day and never made the connection until I spotted my old pen pal’s last name printed on the mailbox. Back when I wrote letters, I would tell that story with the reverent tone of an evangelist talking about the miracle that changed his life. It was the kind of beautiful coincidence that reminds you why letters matter.

This letter-writing evangelist has seen the light again.

My message is simple: Stop reading this essay and write a letter. Instead of clicking
through to the next link or opening up another window on your browser, grab a sheet of paper. Write a letter.

People's Libraries

Tue, 15 May 2012 19:23:00 -0400

A peek at my upcoming book at The Los Angeles Review of Books:

JASON BOOG

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.

Read More

"I’m just old enough to remember the Great Depression. After the first few years, by the mid-1930s —..."

Tue, 15 May 2012 11:33:02 -0400

“

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..."

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 07:23:00 -0400

“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…

MacGyver Solutions & the Publishing Industry

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 07:23:00 -0400

MacGyver Solutions & the Publishing Industry:

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.

Newspaper Strikes of the Great Depression

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 07:23:00 -0400

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.

Newhouse described the scene: “the sound truck led off a parade of 28 cars which wound through Newark until late at night. I don’t think there is a person in Newark who doesn’t know about this strike. People from the curbs and from other cars which pulled up and shouted encouragement at us. The strikers took turns at the mike and their speeches rang with fight and determination.”

They were fighting for higher wages for freelance correspondents, a particularly vulnerable population in any recession. Wages were dipping below the unlivable wage of $15 a week for these reporters. Just like the Aughts, employees were getting cut at an alarming rate, and the union sought wages of $20 to $45 a week, a five day schedule with 40 day work week and “dismissal wage” for writers fired during the Depression.

Want to read more? Over at The Open Library, you can read a free eBook copy of Newhouse’s 1937 novel, This Is Your Day.

Delmore Schwartz & the Great Depression

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 16:26:56 -0500

chiseler:

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.

Read More

Bestsellers of the Great Depression

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 07:23:00 -0500

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.”

Napoleon Hill & the Great Depression

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 07:23:00 -0500

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 been writing about Hill, and uncovered that vintage book ad at the Library of Congress through the Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library.

Follow this link download a free digital copy of Think and Grow Rich.