Kharpertian’s sharp reading of Great Depression literature decenters the
public and scholarly preference for narratives about groups uniting to
overcome financial hardships, a genre symbolized by John Steinbeck’s The
Grapes of Wrath. Instead, she emphasizes works by Sanora Babb, Frank
Waters, and John Fante that more accurately account for the limited
choices and repeated failures of those attempting to survive. Moving
away from The Grapes of Wrath provides a “more historically precise,
zoomed-in literary portrait of those who failed in the West.” Instead of
overcoming hardship through collective action, Kharpertian argues that
class in these texts “locks characters in spaces and to forms of work”
that inhibit the individual’s attempts at survival; the conditions of
their hardship produce a “feedback loop,” through which those very
conditions are sustained. This loop forecloses the possibility of
community organization. Instead, it creates characters subject to the
full force of brutal working conditions set against the backdrop of
ecological and economic collapses in the 1930s.
https://www.clereviewofbooks.com/home/cowboy-ranch-labor-western-literature-we-who-work-the-west
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