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As a writer who published his first short stories and novels in the 1930's, I was caught up in the passions of a period when the Revolution to so many American writers was the number one passion.
Poor Miss Revolution, how she's been downgraded in retrospect by her one-time lovers; passions spent, a graybearded chorus singing: “We didn't love you after all.” So many books about the 1930's by writers who have forgotten or want to forget the kind of men they were once or hoped to be or were afraid to be. But to concentrate on what was wrong with the 1930's is to expunge the heart, is to omit its joy, youth—and love.
The writers felt the hot breath of history. The decade was a beating heart echoing the shuffling feet on the picket lines; and the thunderous rhythm of the booted regiments… Out of insecurity, the hungry writer created a philosophy, a dream, a vision of a country where all men would be secure.
Writers were hungry back then. “A regular meal ticket! “they exclaimed joyously when they were hired by the WPA Writers'Projects; enrolling in the thousands all over the land. Published writers, unpublished and would-be writers. Most of the little magazines of the 1930's had no money to pay contributors. Neither the university-based magazines like Midland, Frontier, Westminster Quarterly, or those put out by shoestring editors, Blast, Anvil, Modern Monthly, Kosmos. The Partisan Review that began as the organ of the John Reed Club and was then “captured,” as the angry Communist editors charged, by the Trotskyites, had a hard time just to keep afloat. I remember trying to crash a benefit dance for The Partisan Review—I was broke—and trying