This book addresses the field of American fiction and literary criticism during the years of the Great Depression in America. The political, social, and cultural upheavals that followed the stock market crash of 1929 made the thirties a complex decade during which leftist intellectuals merged new ideologies with long-existing structures of national identity. The conclusions reached, based on these attempted mergers of ideology and identity, were in turn altered by the national political developments that ensued as the country underwent modernizing reconfigurations of the national infrastructure. While political shifts altered the path of the radical left political movements, the literary culture produced by these movements was influenced, even more directly, by the increasing ubiquity of mass culture.