In/The Deep End: The Literary Scene in the Great Depression and Today/
<https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B08BH42HB9/counterpunchmaga>(OR
Books, 2020), the journalist Jason Boog writes about the plight of
writers in the United States since the stock market crash of 2008 and
compares their challenges to those of poets, novelists, and journalists
in the 1930s. When focusing on the mid-20^th Century, Boog, the West
Coast correspondent for/Publishers Weekly/, highlights better-known
literary figures from the Great Depression (Richard Wright, Cornell
Woolrich, Muriel Rukeyser, Nathaniel West, Kenneth Fearing) along with
more obscure authors (Edward Newhouse, Maxwell Bodenheim, Orrick Johns,
Anca Vrbovska).
Boog roots this excellent survey of past and present literary lives in
his own experiences as a journalist whose employer, a legal publication,
went under in 2008. Without office space, security, or health insurance,
Boog perched himself near the American Literature stacks at New York
University’s Bobst Library and began an obsessive search for insights
into how his predecessors made it through the Great Depression. This
quest started with Edward Newhouse’s 1932 novel/You Can’t Sleep Here/,
about an unemployed newspaper reporter who finds himself sleeping in a
tent city along Manhattan’s East River, his only showering option a New
York Public Library bathroom. Boog recalls, “A quiet desperation
permeated every line of Newhouse’s story. I couldn’t stop reading.” The
novel’s protagonist is told that “Anybody who really wants to work can
find a job,” an old saw which prompts Boog to note that the claim is as
false in the 21^st Century as it was in the 20^th .
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/09/14/the-literary-scene-in-the-great-depression-and-today/
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#1555): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/1555
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/76840592/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
