New Deal modernism: American literature and the invention of the welfare state

Abstract

In New Deal Modernism Michael Szalay examines the effect that the rise of the welfare state had on American modernism during the 1930s and 1940s and, conversely, what difference modernism made to the New Deal's famed invention of Big Government. Moving beyond accounts of literary modernism that have been preoccupied with fascism and communism, Szalay situates his study within a liberal culture bent on social security, a culture galvanised by its imagined need for private and public insurance. Because the WPA Federal Arts Project offered a particular kind of insurance - a wage to writers unable to find a market for their work - a salaried class of writers took form, one committed more to producing art than to selling it. This performance-oriented investment in art as process, Szalay claims, was embraced by a diverse group of writers not all of whom were clients of the state. It is through this lens that Szalay looks at writers and others - from Jack London, James M. Cain, Gertrude Stein, and Betty Smith to Busby Berkeley, John Dewey, and John Maynard Keynes. Contributing to the great range of the study are a discussion of the role played by Franklin Roosevelt in this rewriting of free-market culture and extended analyses of the work of Ernest Hemingway, Wallace Stevens, John Steinbeck, and Richard Wright. This examination of the evolution of modernism in its interaction with a reformist federal government will be of compelling interest to students of culture and intellectual history.

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