1940's The Arts | Fiction in Transition

Social Realism Exhausted.

The 1940s were an in-between era for American fiction. The decade marked an end and also a beginning. Social realism was the trend coming to a close. The 1930s had seen a rise in social concern among fiction writers. Novelists such as James T. Farrell, Erskine Caldwell, and Theodore Dreiser had aimed for socially significant fiction that portrayed working people fighting against the machine of capitalism. Novelists such as Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, and Willa Gather had for three decades presented a realistic fiction entrenched in American landscapes and language. They were often political writers with a political agenda. In 1939, with the publication of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, social realism reached its peak. Steinbeck's novel, which followed the journey of Oklahoma's poor to the "promised land" of California, only to see them crushed by forces beyond their control, was the...