How the Great Depression Spawned Literary Masterworks

The Great Depression was one of the most desperate periods in U.S. history, and one of the most important in American literature.

When the stock market crashed in October 1929 and the hectic prosperity of the 1920s gave way to mass unemployment, the crisis energized American writers. After a decade in which the literary experiments of the Modernists -- Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot -- dominated the scene, a new wave of writers began to look to politics and economics for inspiration.