New Deal Modernism

Michael Szalay is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at University of California, Irvine.

“New Deal Modernism tells a strikingly new story about the relations of literature to political agency. Szalay’s work will be a welcome provocation, both to left revisionist scholarship on cultural politics and to the historiography of U.S. modernism.”-Sara Blair, University of Michigan “An argument of striking range and precision. Oppositions of left and right, realist and modernist will look different from now on. A terrific book.”-Richard Ohmann, Wesleyan University “Szalay brilliantly relates aesthetic debates of the 1930s to debates over how art might survive economic conditions in which art objects have little chance of competing with basic economic necessities. Szalay’s unique contribution is to show exactly how, in providing insurance against the market, the New Deal reinvented the project of making art.”-Frances Ferguson, Johns Hopkins University “Through its frank assessment of New Deal culture, Szalay’s book adds mightily to the renascence of history-minded revisions of literary modernism. If you want to know how literary citizenship connected with the social motion of state initiatives like the Social Security Administration or the Federal Arts Project, then this is a very good place to begin.”-Andrew Ross, New York University

• Introduction: The Literature of the Welfare State 1. “The Whole Question of What Writing Is”: Jack London, the Literary Left, and the Federal Writers’ Project 2. The Politics of Textual Integrity: Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway 3. Wallace Stevens and the Invention of Social Security 4. The Vanishing American Father: Sentiment and Labor in The Grapes of Wrath and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 5. “The Death of the Gallant Liberal”: Robert Frost, Richard Wright, and Busby Berkeley Conclusion: New Deal Postmodernism Notes Index