Reviving the Thirties: The Case for Teaching Proletarian Fiction in the Undergraduate Literature Classroom

Undergraduate literature courses tend to neglect American fiction of the 1930s, especially the proletarian novel. Disregard of this particular genre is often based on the assumption that it emphasized a crude Marxist realism opposed to aesthetic modernism. Various examples of the genre are, in fact, worth teaching, especially because they do not fall simply into either camp. Such texts include John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy and Fielding Burke’s novel Call Home the Heart.