Introduction

Abstract

The writers who are the subjects of these essays generally began to write in the early 1930s, a matter of timing that is significant in several ways. The peculiar character of the decade, in terms of both literary and political history, placed them in a sobering position.¹ Also, major experimentation had taken place in the development of the novel. Thus novelists starting out in the 1930s, whatever else the more personal influences on them, simultaneously had to assimilate changes in the novel form and to cope with a darkening world situation. This proved to be an odd combination of circumstances. The more flexible form of the novel associated with Modernism might have been expected to lend itself to the newly available dramatic subject matter; yet until recently, most of these authors have been thought of as atypical of their immediate period — and distinctly lesser — because for the most part, they emphasize in realistic terms the private rather than the public significance of experience.² Further, their turning away from the internationalization of the novel by the great Modernists of the first quarter of the century has seemed to many a capitulation, a regressive giving in to their own limitations.³ Criticized for being parochial and seemingly uninterested in the important subjects, these novelists — along with other writers of the 1930s — have too frequently been regarded either with amused tolerance or scorn.