Real Folks: Race and Genre in the Great Depression

Abstract

When we imagine ordinary Americans in the 1930s, many of us think of the subjects of Dorothea Lange's photographs or the characters in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939). But Sonnet Retman complements those images in Real Folks by exploring representations of the folk in five less-well-known works by novelists, ethnographers, and filmmakers from the decade of the Great Depression. She spends one chapter each on the novels Black No More (1931) by George Schuyler and A Cool Million (1934) by Nathaniel West, the Federal Writers' Project's 1939 travel guide Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State, Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men (her 1935 collection of folklore), and Preston Sturges's 1941 movie Sullivan's Travels. As Retman shows, the creators of these texts constructed the category of “the folk” in varied and complicated ways. These texts focus not just on the poor, rural whites so often shown by the more familiar works of the period, but also on African Americans and sometimes Native Americans. Furthermore, instead of presenting the folk “as a pastoral resource integral to the nation's healing and crucial to the brokering of new deals,” these writers and filmmakers used the folk to critique American ideals and to demonstrate the realities of racism, classism, and consumerism in 1930s America (p. 2).