New Deal Modernism

Argues that the writers of the 30s and 40s--Hemingway, Ayn Rand, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright, Wallace Stevens et al. -- identified and understood the formal problems of literary modernism through an idea of the social and an idiom of social security made available by the New Deal welfare state.

Examines the effect that the rise of the welfare state had on American modernism during the 1930s and 1940s and, conversely, what difference modernism made to the New Deal's famed invention of "Big Government."In New Deal Modernism Michael Szalay examines the effect that the rise of the welfare state had on American modernism during the 1930s and 1940s, and, conversely, what difference this revised modernism made to the New Deal’s famed invention of “Big Government.”
Szalay situates his study within a liberal culture bent on security, a culture galvanized by its imagined need for private and public insurance.
Taking up prominent exponents of social and economic security—such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes, and John Dewey—Szalay demonstrates how the New Deal’s revision of free-market culture required rethinking the political function of aesthetics. Focusing in particular on the modernist fascination with the relation between form and audience, Szalay offers innovative accounts of Busby Berkeley, Jack London, James M. Cain, Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, Betty Smith, and Gertrude Stein, as well as extended analyses of the works of Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Richard Wright.