Racial Identity in American Literature of the 1930s: Three Examples

Abstract

Views of racial identity have shifted greatly throughout American history and are a crucial part of American culture. The 1930s was an era in which national policies redefined what it meant to be “white”, and the great depression impacted the poor disproportionally. This paper explores the development of racial identity in the 1930s by focusing on three particular literary works from this time in the United States using both textual analysis and qualitative analysis. By analyzing these three novels, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, it can be found that not only the larger social and economic background of the time affected and even created these works, but authors’ personal experiences played important roles. The proportion of the effect of the social environment to the effect of unique personal circumstances in these novels varies greatly—it can be found that while The Grapes of Wrath can almost be entirely attributed to what happened in real life (thus the use and development of realism), Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Good Earth have personal experiences integrated into the lines that have close connections to the author’s personal identity as a member of a certain cultural group. These differences might stem from the difference between being in the majority or minority racially.