“There is something about poverty that smells like death,” Zora Neale Hurston wrote in her 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. “Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. People can be slave-ships in shoes.”1 Hurston’s metaphorical language draws our attention less to a social condition than to a state of the soul, a spiritual condition heavy with a sense of illness, decay, and entrapment. Hurston draws her images from nature but she is no naturalist. What interests her most is not the caste or class system that may produce poverty but the feelings of hopelessness that flow from it. Though critics still identify Depression writing with direct, politically engaged social criticism, the work of Hurston and her most powerful rival, Richard Wright, shows how much more is involved.

There is no single work of art or literature that summarizes the deep concern with poverty or the new fascination with the lives of ordinary Americans in the 1930s. The work of documentary photographers like Walker Evans may come the closest, in part because the unvarnished humanity of their subjects seemed to transcend its historical moment. Thanks to the faith in economic individualism and Social Darwinism, the poor had often been blamed for their lack of initiative or their defective morals. But the economic crisis of the thirties drew attention not only to the miserable lot of the poor, but to the daily experience of other people also coping with tough times. Writers and photographers appealed not to middle-class pity or charity but to the widespread fear of falling, the deep sense of insecurity that had corroded the American Dream. The common man became a subject of intense interest at the same time it became a political slogan.

What began with Gold’s Jews without Money in 1930 culminated with the surprising commercial success of The Grapes of Wrath in 1939 and Native Son in 1940. The radical novel came of age at the very moment when it was set to expire, undone by the patriotism and prosperity ushered in by the war. In Steinbeck’s book the familiar hero of proletarian fiction, defeated yet dauntless even in death, is replaced by the down-home American family, coming apart, losing its land, yet also learning how the world works, even reconstructing a shattered sense of community as it struggles to survive. Only the pictures of Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, Marion Post Wolcott, Russell Lee, Jack Delano, and other photographers for the Farm Security Administration could compete with Steinbeck’s story and its peerless film version in offering vivid images of marginal lives during the Depression.

In this constellation of works that rounded off the decade, Richard Wright’s books occupy a special place, for they brought the Depression home to the cities and highlighted the special disabilities of race, which even the sharecropper images had largely sidestepped. Evans and Agee, avoiding the question of race entirely, portrayed three white tenant families in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Native Son, with its thriller plot and visceral violence, its wide circulation thanks to the Book-of-the-Month Club, shocked the nation with bad news about ghetto conditions and black fear and hatred of whites that most Americans had never imagined. It also brought home the inner experience of poverty in an indelible way.

In a decade when many Americans did badly, blacks did worse. The jobs they sought by migrating north throughout the 1920s had disappeared. Some of those jobs fell to poor whites. At the peak of the Depression in the winter of 1932–33, when 25 percent of Americans were unemployed, 50 percent of blacks had no jobs. The Roosevelt administration could not or would not confront such inequities directly because it depended politically on its southern base, but New Deal housing, slum clearance, employment, and relief programs helped, since they were applied without consideration of race. According to the historian William E. Leuchtenburg, “in many areas, Negroes, hit harder than any group by the depression, survived largely because of relief checks.”2 Agricultural subsidies, on the other hand, went only to landowners. Paid to withhold land from cultivation, they often let their black sharecroppers go, worsening the rural Depression for many of their tenants. Efforts to create a tenant farmers’ union were ruthlessly put down by local authorities and night-riding vigilantes. “The New Deal was not to blame for the social system it inherited,” say Leuchtenburg, “but New Deal policies made matters worse. The AAA’s reduction of cotton acreage drove the tenant and the cropper from the land, and the landlords, with the connivance of local AAA committees which they dominated, cheated tenants of their fair share of benefits” (137).

Richard Wright, by contrast, was determined to make not only the condition of blacks but their masked inner lives visible to white Americans, perhaps for the first time. Most directly, in one of the last major works on poverty and the Depression, he described the plight of both rural and urban blacks in the text he wrote to accompany Edwin Rosskam’s extraordinary selection of FSA photographs in 12 Million Black Voices (1941). His commentary covered every phase of black life, but it was especially riveting in describing the typical “kitchenette” of Chicago’s Black Belt, the rat-infested, privacy-deprived, one-room slum apartment that incubates disease, prostitution, and the sullen antisocial violence of a Bigger Thomas.