Abstract
Literature of the Great Depression of the 1930s has remained distinctive and important in American culture because it so powerfully illustrates the effects that economic change can have on a society. The severe economic downturn of 1929– 1933 rattled and reorganized American social life— including the culture of literary intellectuals. 1 Although the causes of profound social change are often complex and obscure, in this period they appeared with great clarity. During the 1930s, objective conditions altered the substance and form of subjective life, and American novelists responded to this alteration.