The Middle Class in the Great Depression: Popular Womens Novels of the 1930s [Paperback]

In contrast to most studies of literature from the Great Depression which focus on representations of poverty, labor, and radicalism, this project analyzes popular representations of middle class life.Introduction: Popular Women's Literature, Class, and the Great Depression 1. History, Normalcy, and Daily Life: Margaret Ayer Barnes and Jessie Redmon Fauset 2. Women Exploring Class: Fannie Hurst, Edna Ferber, and Katharine Brush 3. Family Life in Depressed America: Josephine Johnson and Josephine Lawrence 4. Single Women, Violence, and Class: Mary Roberts Rinehart 5. Professional Women, Work, and Romance: Gale Wilhelm, Fannie Cook, and Dawn Powell

'Haytock provides excellent close readings of her primary texts, demonstrating that middlebrow women writers were grappling with the Depression as much as their working-class sisters. The Middle Class in the Great Depression is lively and well structured, with chapters devoted to a wide array of authors and corresponding themes, including the negotiation of 'normalcy,' class, family life, violence, and work.' - Lisa Botshon, Professor of English, University of Maine at Augusta, USA

Jennifer Haytock is Professor and Chair in the English Department at The College at Brockport, SUNY, USA, where she teaches twentieth-century American literature. She has published At Home, At War: Domesticity and World War I in American Literature and Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism, as well as articles on Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, and more.