A review by justabean_reads
Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression by Morris Dickstein

informative reflective slow-paced

4.0

Covering conflicting strains in artistic expression throughout the depression across all mediums. The book started with a close focus on Michael Gold's Jews Without Money (which I've read and enjoyed) and Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (which apparently I ought to read), thus setting up tension between social justice message-focused media, and more ambiguous modernist works. It was fairly dense and covers a lot of works I wasn't familiar with, especially in terms of novels, and more or less only deals with American works. I felt like it could have spent more time dealing with sexuality and gender, which basically get one chapter at the end, but there was quite a bit about Black writers. The author teaches this topic, and often includes anecdotes about his students trying to interpret the material, as well as his own first encounters with it in the 1950s and 1960s, which added an approachable edge. It will comprehensibly spill the plot details of every major artistic work of the 1930s, in case you didn't want to be spoiled on any of them.