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