Working-Class Heroes in Literature

[BridgeTheGap]

When you imagine an author, what do they look like? Do they wear a fuzzy, slightly oversized sweater and stroke an equally fuzzy and slightly oversized cat perched on their lap? Does the author have postgraduate degrees framed on the wall? Or a “Best Young American Novelist” award next to his vintage typewriter? That image is one of someone who has never gotten his hands dirty, except to maybe plant some heirloom tomatoes on the balcony of his condo. In a thoroughly researched and deftly reasoned essay for Tin House, Gerald Howard explains why Americans no longer expect writers to have a blue-collar background:

Work—especially the sort of work that gets your hands dirty and that brands you as a member of the working class—no longer seems germane to our novelists’ apprenticeships and, not coincidentally, is no longer easy to find in the fiction they produce. Whether one finds this scarcity something to worry about or simply a fact to be noted probably says a lot about one’s class origins and prejudices.

Howard’s essay maps the trajectory of American literature onto the course of the country’s socio-economic history. At the beginning of the 20th century, Howard notes, “As the forces of industrialization, immigration, and urbanization began in earnest to transform America from a mostly rural civilization, our novelists took careful note, producing ‘naturalistic’ works that acutely registered the class drama of these epic social and economic developments.” He goes on to write that “the thirties became the literary decade of the worker” and, thus, “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.” A bumper crop of working-class authors were published during and after the Great Depression—most famously John Steinbeck—but this literary trend would fade after the end of World War II.

But why? According to Howard, working-class authors came out of vogue during a generation of mass upward mobility and rising standards of living:

http://www.utne.com/Great-Writing/Working-Class-Heroes-in-Literature.aspx?utm_content=09.20.10+Great+Writing&utm_campaign=Emerging+Ideas-Every+Day&utm_source=iPost&utm_medium=email

[TBF]

1. Recommended - nt

[Hannah Bell]

2. very interesting --