In this innovative study, Michael Staub recasts 1930s cultural history by analyzing those genres characteristic of the Depression era: Staub argues that several thirties writers were aware of the ambiguousness of historical truth, and the impossibility of representing reality without being complicitous in its distortion. New interpretations of such canonized authors as James Agee, John Dos Passos, Zora Neale Hurston, John G. Neihardt, and Tillie Olson are coupled with critical discussions of previously little-known works of ethnography, journalism, oral history and polemical fiction.