| The voices of the working class are often silenced. In a society that masks or ignores class status, the stories and histories of blue-collar workers are subsequently left out of canonical literary study. However, this is not to say that certain chronicles of workingclass life and writing do not exist. On the contrary, throughout the 1930s and 1940s, there was a strong move by American writers to collect and chronicle the stories and voices of the working class. Whether deemed documentary, autobiographical, radical, or proletarian writings, these texts provide compelling insight into both the lives of laborers of the time as well as the radical motivations of their writers. Despite different exigencies and rhetorical situations, one issue becomes clear within these varied writings: these genres of writing were “radical” in their own ways. The life histories and radical novels of the 1930s and 1940s renegotiated what it meant to produce “radical” artistic expression because they extended their radical ideals beyond labor issues and Marxist concerns to also include gender exploitation, racial discrimination, sexuality and reproductive values, American folk life, and traditional notions of “American” history. These issues have received little attention in critical circles because critics and government officials alike were so preoccupied with red-baiting that they overlooked some of the much more pervasive, and ultimately progressive, issues at work in these texts.; This project will attempt to not only recover some of these writings that have been left out of the American literary canon, but, more importantly, introduce the multiple ways in which these proletarian writers, such as Jack Conroy, Grace Lumpkin, Meridel Le Sueur, and Alexander Saxton, and documentarians, such as the those of the Federal Writers' Project and World War II women workers who contributed their voices to memoirs and oral histories, interpreted the radical vision. In addition to forming a theoretical construct by which scholars can examine working-class literature of the period, this project also provides suggestions for how teachers can teach the literature of the working class from both literary and rhetorical perspectives. |
