Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 22

18 _^Po£ular^CuUui^^ these writers, the imagination proved insufficient because it could not come close to the harsh realities of the Depression. One did not need to contrive a fictional setting of abject poverty to bring home the larger truth of a self-destructing economy; one only had to look at the long bread lines to discover that truth, llius, many artists abandoned the isolation of their writing rooms for the cross-country journeys of the documentary journalist (pp. 195-196). The documentary journalists of the Thirties worshiped at the altar of the social fact. They were concerned with the accumulation of the "pure facts" of daily life through the techniques of observation, detailed description, and straightforward prose. Their works touted a rigorous objectivity, with the writers letting the facts speak for themselves. For the most part, the ideological posturing so evident in the proletarian works was absent. Instead, the documentarians envisioned themselves as human cameras recording life as it is, rather than as it should be. Pells emphasized that because reportage concerns the concrete and specific of life, it enabled the Depression-era writers to gain a sense of order and stability in a time of social chaos and inner turmoil (pp. 196-197). In their search for the social fact, documentary journalists, particularly those writing book-length accounts, waded knee-deep into the waters of Depression-era reality. The purpose of this article is to examine what they sought to accomplish by employing the techniques of the documentarian, and the sense they made of the America they discovered. Six book-length documentaries of the period are examined: The American Jitters; A Year of the Slump, and Travels in Two Democracies by Edmund Wilson; Tragic America by Theodore Dreiser; Puzzled America and Hometown by Sherwood Anderson; and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee (photographs by Walker Evans). These books are representative of the writers of the Thirties who perceived fiction as inadequate for conveying the impact of econonuc and social upheaval. Concoctions of the imagination pale in comparison with the real-life drama of the struggle for survival and the derailment of the American Dream. Wilson, Dreiser, Anderson, and Agee traveled throughout the country to learn if the long shadow of the Depression has eclipsed the American spirit. While Wilson and Anderson appeared more content to let the readers arrive at their own conclusions, Dreiser expressed righteous indignation over what he observed. Agee, meanwhile.