Facing a world that seemed in danger of losing its way, shapers of the documentary movement in the thirties brought to culmination the most extensive literary and artistic effort ever launched in the United States to search out, record, examine, and alter the life and values of the people of the United States. The guidebooks sponsored by the WPA present the thirties as a casualty of the past. They focus on dusty, windblown streets and peeling storefronts; on dried-up towns and eroded farms; on segregated water fountains and segregated restrooms; on houses whose windows and doors are shut; and on faces that are gaunt, blank, or even battered. Reiterating the messages conveyed by the titles of books like Dreiser’s Tragic America (1931), Wilson’s American Jitters (1932), and Anderson’s Puzzled America (1935), they provide correctives, as Robert Cantwell noted, “to the success stories that dominate our literature.” At the same time, they exemplify energy and resolve. By bringing photography into innovative conjunctions with new modes of reporting, Bourke-White and Caldwell, Wright and Rosskam, Lange and Taylor, and Agee and Evans added a literary dimension to the “bold, persistent experimentation” that was the trademark of the New Deal. In the process, they helped to salvage and rehabilitate both “America” and “the People” as ideas of genuine force.

Moved by a similar sense of crisis, historical novelists like Kenneth Roberts searched through the nation’s past, looking for heroes. Documentary works of the thirties focus on the average suffering of the neglected and voiceless poor – and, if only as putative presences, on the intent, inquiring faces of writers and photographers jerked to attention by that suffering.