1930s

Scope|Overview Sources|Notable Fiction|Personalities and Events|Periodicals, Journals, & Trade Publications|Web Sites

SCOPE: American was burdened by the depression in the 1930s. Thirteen million Americans were unemployed. (Layman, AmericanDecades) President Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the New Deal, which would improve the economic status of the country. By 1939, prosperity had returned, the nation had a leading position in world affairs, and civil liberties were expanded.

OVERVIEW SOURCES (located in the Reference Collection)

REF E 169.1.B664 1990 American Chronicle

REF E 169.12.A419 American Decades, 1930-39

REF E 169.02.M3547 1997 Daily Life in the United Sates, 1920-1939 Decades of promise and pain

REF E 161.T55 This Fabulous Century 1930-1940

REF E 174.5.W46 1991 The U.S.A: A Chronicle in Pictures

Some representative books from the Circulating Collection are:

NOTABLE FICTION

Beckett, Samuel. Murphy. New York: Grove Press, 1957.

Buck, Pearl S. The Good Earth. Cutchogue, New York: Buccaneer Books, 1992.

Dinesen, Isak. Seven Gothic Tales. New York: Vintage Books, 1972.

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. New York: Modern Library, 1967.

Faulkner, William. Light in August. New York: Modern Library, 1959.

Graves, Robert. I, Claudius. New York: Random House, 1961.

Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. New York: Vintage Books, 1972.

Hemingway, Ernest. To Have and Have Not. New York: Scribner, 1965.

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking, 1939.

Malraux, Andre. Man's Fate. New York: Modern Library, 1961.

Mann, Thomas. Joseph and His Brothers. New York: Knopf, 1974.

Miller, Henry. Tropic of Cancer. New York: Grove Press, 1961.

Mitchell, Margaret. Gone with the Wind. New York: Scribner, 1964.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Laughter in the Dark. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

Porter, Katherine Anne. Flowering Judas and Other Stories. New York: The Modern Library, 1935.

Rawlings, Mafrjorie Kinnan. The Yearling. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

Roberts, Kenneth. Northwest Passage. Camden, Maine: Down East Books, 2001.

Steinbeck, John. Miss Lonelyhearts; & The Day of the Locust. New York: Modern Library, 1961.

Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. New York: New Directions, 1969.

Wolfe, Thomas. Of Time and the River. New York: C. Scribners Sons, 1935.

PERSONALITIES AND EVENTS

Conklin, Paul Keith. The New Deal. Wheeling, ILL: Harlan Davidson, 1992.

Cooney, Terry A. Balancing Acts: American Thought and Culture in the 1930s. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995.

Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s. New York: Library of America, 1997.

Davis, Kenneth Sydeny. FDR: The War President, 1940-1943. New York: Random House, 2000.

Edwards, June. Women in American Education, 1820-1955: The Female Force and Educational Reform. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.

Graham, Hugh Davis. Huey Long. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, 1970.

Guthrie, Woody. Bound for Glory. New York: Plume, 1983.

Guthrie, Woody. Pastures of Plenty: A Self-Portrait. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.

Hickman, Larry. John Dewey's Pragmatic Technology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Himmelberg, Robert F. The Great Depression and the New Deal. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2001.

Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Klemperer, Victor. I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941.
New York: Random House, 1998.

Lindenmeyer, Kriste. The Greatest Generation Grows Up: American Childhood in the
1930s. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005.

Nash, George H. The Life of Herbert Hoover. New York: W.W. Norton, 1983.

Partridge, Elizabeth. Dorothea Lange A Visual Life. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994.

Shindo, Charles J. Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997.

Theoharis, Athan G. The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988.

Ware, Susan. Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s. Boston: Twayne, 1982.

Weinberg, Steve. Armand Hammer: The Untold Story. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989.

Weisberger, Bernard A. The WPA Guide to America: The Best of 1930s America as Seen by the Federal Writers Project. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.

PERIODICALS, JOURNALS, & TRADE PUBLICATIONS

Click the link for a list of full text journals available through our databases in:

• United States History-General

Open Access Journals in History

WEB SITES

AS@UVA: 1930s Project
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~1930s/front.html
This web site from the  Department of American Studies at the University of Virginia provides information on "films, radio programs, literature, journalism, museums, exhibitions, architecture, art, and other forms of cultural expression" in the 1930s.

Updated 08/22/2007