“A fine loud grabble and snatch of AAA and WPA”: Faulkner, Hurston, Wright, Bontemps, and the Depression South

Martyn Bone*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingBook chapterResearchpeer-review

Abstract

This chapter considers how a range of U.S. southern writers with varying political views responded to the Depression and New Deal. It stresses that even when competing visions of and for the South were articulated by different “fronts” in the period’s “cultural wars,” such visions were not always reducible to left versus right, communism versus capitalism, or “Agrarian versus Industrial.” William Faulkner’s short fiction between 1941 and 1943 reveals complex, contradictory attitudes toward the New Deal, especially the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The writing of Zora Neale Hurston, including texts produced for the WPA’s Federal Writers Project, includes a critique of Jim Crow labor exploitation comparable to the work of her supposed antagonist (and fellow FWP author) Richard Wright. Arna Bontemps’s historical novels, especially Black Thunder (1936), approach Depression-era social upheaval allegorically by depicting earlier black laborers revolting against slavery in the U.S. South and the Caribbean.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationA History of the Literature of the U.S. South
EditorsHarilaos Stecopoulos
Publishercambridge university press (cup)
Publication date2021
Pages263-281
ISBN (Print)9781108491679
ISBN (Electronic)9781108666657
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© Cambridge University Press 2021.

Keywords

  • Arna Bontemps
  • Depression
  • Federal Writers Project
  • Great Migration
  • Harlem Renaissance
  • John Faulkner
  • New Deal
  • Popular Front
  • Richard Wright
  • Socialist realism
  • Southern Renaissance
  • William Faulkner
  • Works Progress Administration
  • WPA modernism
  • Zora Neale Hurston

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