Proletarian Writers of the Thirties

In the Thirties appeared many books dealing with the wandering “bottom dog,” projecting a sense of Americans uprooted from pastoral as well as industrial settings. “Proletarian Writers of the Thirties,” a collection of fifteen essays especially written for this volume, looks at the common man in poetry, criticism, and novels, examining his uprooting and his “protest.” In the course of these essays the reader unfamiliar with proletarian writing will be introduced to a great variety of works. In order to achieve a balanced perspective, extravagant claims for or against certain novels and attitudes have been avoided. The relative informality of approach and the critical quality of the essays will attract the general reader as well as the specialist. Both will discover why from the proletarian position, the view of America is startlingly sharp: there is reason for “protest.”