• Majed Allehaibi

  Author

Many writers of the 1930s made conscious moves toward the political left. “The nation became
less materialistic and more community-minded” (Bercovitch, 189). They followed the advice
given by Mike Gold in New Masses in 1929: “Go left, Young Writers.” The political left was
more attractive to writers since it preached “an old morality of self-denial and sacrifice in service
to a noble cause” (Bercovitch, 194). It led to a “literary revolution,” which produced a great deal
of “Proletarian” fiction. It documented, recorded and dramatized the crippling effects of poverty
while it also examined the human cost.
U.S.A. reflects the nation’s “rapid transformation of itself into a mass society… [by
reflecting] the processes of the external world as people were coming to know it”
(Bercovitch,168).The author innovation was to incorporate the new media to make “scattered
particulars of social life and the patchwork culture of the United States visible” (Bercovitch,
206). The collage allows him to make “historical figures interact with fictional characters,
blurring the line between history and fiction …and the line between documentary reports and
imaginative stories” (Bercovitch, 206).

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