The Middle Class in the Great Depression Popular Women's Novels of the 1930s

Examining popular women's novels of the 1930s, this study explores how middlebrow literature imagined gender and class identity during one of the most economically devastating times in U.S. history. These forgotten writers - Edna Ferber, Fannie Hurst, Margaret Ayer Barnes, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Katharine Brush, and others - portrayed women's lives and a great variety of issues that affected them, including marriage, motherhood, professionalism, violence, and racism. Through adept close readings, Jennifer Haytock demonstrates that Depression-era realist fiction portrays a range of changes in daily life and draws new conclusion about the American Dream.

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.

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