What Books Survive from the 1930s?

Abstract

An age of faith — such as the 1930s appear to be in retrospect — is almost certain to become an age of quarrels among the faithful. They divide into bitterly hostile sects, each with a different leader and each hoping for support from one group or another among the infidels. Such quarrels disfigure the pattern of the 1930s, especially toward the end. Looking back from another age, however, one is surprised to find how much the American writers in different factions, as well as those standing apart from any faction, radical or conservative, were affected by the same fears and aspirations for human society. ‘ There is a great destiny ’, Emerson says in his journal for 1841,which comes in with this as with every age, which is colossal in its traits, terrible in its strength, which cannot be tamed, or criticized, or subdued. It is shared by every man and woman of the time, for it is by it they live. As a vast, solid phalanx the generation comes on, they have the same features, and their pattern is new in the world. All wear the same expression, but it is that which they do not detect in each other. It is this one life which ponders in the philosophers, which drudges in the laborers, which basks in the poets, which dilates in the love of the women….