A Quote From Anatole Broyard 's ' The Perfect Storm ' And The Glass Menagerie '

This excerpt from The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich occurs during the Great Depression, in 1932. Mary and Karl came to North Dakota on the train to see their aunt Fritzie. Erdrich’s choice of third person narration, detached tone, and bleak imagery paired with a juxtaposition between Karl and Mary, sets up a bleak beginning to a story that begins in a bleak time period in American history.

The novel is set during the Great Depression in the 1930’s. During this time, many

The Roaring Twenties and the Jazz Age describe an era of prosperity and entertainment. With fancy parties, cars, houses, and a multitude of wealth, people go about their day with frivolity. However, not all were willing to accept the social changes that goes with the 1920s. One such novel that addresses the liberal era and some reluctance is Eudora Welty’s novel Delta Wedding. Beginning with Laura McRaven travelling to visit her extended family, the Fairchilds, at their plantation in the Mississippi Delta, she experiences the turmoil surrounding her departed mother’s family: the uproar of the oncoming wedding, the tension between her aunts, and the difficulties one must face in becoming a Fairchild. Despite Laura playing the main role of the novel, Welty uses her minor character Robbie Reid to explore the compact Southern family and the polarity between precedent archetypes and the liberal woman of the 1920s.

Today, it is more evident than ever that there are deep divisions within modern society along the lines of race, class and gender. These divides are highlighted by recent protests, riots and movements. These issues are relevant in modern society as well as in two famous stories. Both F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men use character development to make commentary toward these points. Fitzgerald’s novel covers the tumultuous journey of Nick Carraway through the swanky social elite of the 1920’s. Steinbeck’s text covers the opposite end of the spectrum, detailing the experiences of George and Lennie, ranchers during the great depression. While also providing a riveting and captivating plot, these seemingly antithetical tales both develop their respective characters to be normal, everyday people who face difficult problems because of their class.

“The great war proved how confused the world is, the depression is proving it again.” When reading John Updike’s short story “Son” (2) pg.1070 I can see the affects the great depression had on his family. When reading through it I found out the affects it had on his parent’s confidence. An example of how his father were affected is “His father’s old sorrow bore him down into depression, into a hatred of life.” (2) pg. 1072 As a result of his father not enjoying life his health began to decline as if on que. John held a job as a paper boy at a very young age in order to help provide for his family during the hard times. In Johns past, he was surrounded by the gloom of his father and it has shaped his style of writing into

The setting of this novella takes place in Salinas Valley in California during the 1930s, the time of the Great Depression. The Great Depression began when the stock market in the United States dropped rapidly.

The Great Depression was a time of poverty, unemployment, stress, frustration, and of course depression. During that era, many had known and heard about the depression. It wasn’t until a photojournalist, Dorothea Lange, had taken the pictures of a defeated worn out mother, that people had an accurate visual of the Depression. The picture was known as the Migrant Mother. Seeing it with their eyes, many saw a new different perspective of that era.

From the stock market crashing almost rock bottom to banks filing for bankruptcy, the Great Depression was a time of economic hardship for many people. Steinbeck’s Cannery Row depicts a small community of misfits isolated from most of society. The novel follows the stories of these characters, interrupting itself occasionally with a snippet of another tale from within the community. Cannery Row explores the theme of yin-yang within a community. Henri, a painter, wants to maintain the image of a painter instead of actually painting. Dora, the head of a brothel, balances running a tight ship while taking care of her girls at the same time. Doc, a scientist who lives in his lab, has a mixture of conflicting personalities. Throughout the novel,

In a world that is coming apart, due significantly to the 1930’s Depression, family life deteriorates when jobs becomes lost as well as do those whose sense of worth is bound up in them. In both stories, the coping mechanism in males deprived by stress of job loss leads inevitably to a loss of dignity rendering them less able to function as heads of the family. It is at this juncture that women feel the threat to family life is endangered and instinctively cope with the situation, however they can. Lastly, hope, which was sustained, for a time, diminishes for both families, leading to the breaking apart of all that each envisioned. Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Howard’s Cinderella Man demonstrate how quickly a family can disintegrate when its hopes are unrealized.

Born in 1897, William Faulkner was born into a traditional southern family in Mississippi. Throughout his career, Faulkner chronicled the effects of the Great Depression in the postbellum South with his short stories and novels. Following an era of excess and luxury, the Great Depression revolutionized the life of Americans living in the southern states. The economic turmoil brought on by the recession increased existing racial tensions and heightened the disparity between the upper and middle classes. Although it takes place approximately forty-five years prior, allusions to the Great Depression can be seen throughout William Faulkner’s short story “Barn Burning” in the racial and social clashes between Abner and the surrounding community, along with the lifestyle of the Snopes family.

Agee and Evans set out to publish an article in Fortune Magazine, but when they brought back their work to the editors, they were rebuked. The “article” was over 400 pages of controversial writing and even various book editors refused to publish it as a novel. Finally in 1941 it was published by Mifflin in Massachusetts after the author was forced to take out a few outlawed words in the state. They failed in their original mission to produce an “article,” but undoubtedly presented a “photographic and verbal record” of the average white southern tenant farmer families. By living with three different families for four weeks, Evans depicted their innermost sorrows through his photographs, and Agee portrayed and emboldened their spirit by his written words. The novel itself was an experiment in form, with Evans’ photos all placed in the front without captions, rather than dispersed throughout the novel. Even in the text, Agee continually stops himself mid-description and enters into a stream-of-consciousness describing the difficulties of articulating accurately the tenant families true expressions. For these reasons, it was considered a failure when it was published, but also for the same reasons it was considered an amazing success twenty years later in the 1960s.

Brave New World, when put into context with the Great Depression, is a complete antithesis of that particular lifestyle. Perhaps the significantly different lives that characters, such as Lenina, Fanny, and Henry, were seen as the ideal “dream life” to many that lived during a time of ultimate pillage.

Life was once a happy song. The nice ladies with the clacking heals and the smoking sticks sang. Fats, Armstrong, and Gershwin jazzed through the new radio we had; me playing along with my trumpet. The sizzle of mother’s pan whistled in the kitchen. The thumping of Billy and Dick’s feet running up the apartment stairs added bass. The Kid featuring Charles Chaplin played in father’s theater, and the cackling of the audience echoed along it. Even the small coughs of Izzy drummed quietly in the band of joyous life. With a loud crash, though, the melody of life we had before was taken from me almost abruptly by the Great Depression.

Between the years 1929 and 1940, an estimated 1.5 million married women were abandoned by their husbands as a result of the conditions faced during the Great Depression (Mintz and McNeil). The Great Depression was a period of widespread suffering and intense economic hardship that caused soaring rates of unemployment and homelessness, and as a result, many men saw themselves as powerless against society’s decline. Realizing their inability to provide for their families, they left their wives, sons, and daughters to fend for themselves, despite the collapse’s equally paralyzing effect on women and children. Mothers chased after any job available, no matter the difficulty, in order for their families to simply survive. Emily’s mother, the narrator in “I

The novel begins in the 1920’s, a decade that had started in economic boom and avid consumerism, only to end crash and depression. This was a parallel used by