Nobody Starves

[a nice solid clean copy, slight fading to cloth at edges of covers and along spine; the jacket shows some wear at edges and extremities, minor chipping at top of spine]. Novel about a struggling couple, Molly and Bill, "who seek to win a living and a home for themselves in that strange jungle of the motor industry made up of Detroit and its satelite [sic] towns," only to have their modest dreams of a happy life shattered by the onset of the Depression. A stark depiction of a couple of ordinary people gradually worn down by the crushing weight of poverty, and the desperation that propels them towards a tragic end, it's somewhat pretentiously blurbed as "the first important American novel about the Depression" and "a powerful book, Dreiserian in its wealth of detail, but recalling Hugo's Les Miserables (of which it is in some sense a modern counterpart) in its deep probing into the heart of tortured humanity." The author, a onetime office worker, had been a "New Masses" contributor and had also done some undercover journalistic research into workplace conditions (which clearly informed the early chapters of her book, in which Molly is employed in a pottery works). The author's third novel, it was critically well-received and also sold well; the second-state jacket on this particular copy incorporates laudatory quotes from the likes of Sinclair Lewis, Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair. Following this Brody published only one more novel, "Cash Item" (1933), but aside from tracking down a number of book reviews she wrote for the New York Times in the 1940s, I've been unable to determine what ultimately became of her, or why she stopped writing fiction. (The town of "Micmac," by the way, in which much of the novel's action takes place, is generally thought to be a fictionalized version of Flint, Michigan.)

Product Info

Publisher: Longmans, Green and Co.

Year: 1932

Type: Used

Binding: Hardcover

Seller Info

ReadInk

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Country: United States