Renarrating the Thirties in the Forties and Fifties

Abstract

Daniel aaron, writing about American literary communism at the turn into the 1960s, concluded that the literary radicalism of the 1930s had been one more “turn in the cycle of revolt” characterizing the generational politics of American writers since the early 19th Century. The American writer's “running quarrel with his [sic] society” springs “as much from his identity with that society as from his alienation,” Aaron argued. When this rebellion fails to sustain itself, the writer is “gradually absorbed into the society he has rejected.” Like earlier “experiments in rebellion,” the 1930s movement had its “ancestors and founders, its foreign prophets, its manifestoes, its saints and renegades.” It “be[gan] in joy and end[ed] in disillusionment,” although (here Aaron was probably alluding to the early signs of civil rights activity) “amidst its monuments and ruins are the shoots of rebellion to come” (20, 22).

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