Three Essays on Working Class Literature

This book discusses three classic examples of working class literature: "Life in the Iron Mills" by Rebecca Harding Davis, "The New Masses" magazine, and the 1930s protest literature of Clifford Odets. Rebecca Harding Davis wrote "Life in the Iron Mills" in 1861. It was the first work of fiction to describe the lives of the new antebellum working class of industrializing America. It was also an exploration of how class and gender intersected to share a common burden of oppression and hope. "The New Masses" was America's leading leftist literary journal of the 1930s and 1940s. It attempted to legitimize a subject seldom treated in the literature of the time: The common man and the working life. Clifford Odets was a founding member of the radical 1930s theater troupe, the Group Theater and the leading radical playwright of the 1930s. He was also a pioneer writer of the Jewish immigrant experience in America. This book is an overview of these writers and their works and their places in American popular culture.