The empathetic writer, burdened by a guilty sense of privilege, was invariably radicalized by what he saw on the road, by his exposure to so many marginal and miserable people, the detritus of the American dream. While few women took to the road like [Nelson] Algren, they often had the same experiences in bread lines, on picket lines, or among the homeless. They too got involved in the labor wars, witnessing factory lockouts and seeing goons beat up strikers to prevent unions from organizing. Writers moved back and forth between journalism and fiction or poetry. Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath emerged directly out of the wrenching articles he wrote about the conditions of migrant labor. Often the writer became a Communist, or worked with the Communists, not because he or she was strongly political but simply because the Communists, especially at the local level, seemed the most committed to changing society and helping those at the bottom.

Thus writing in the thirties was in many ways an experiment in downward social mobility.