Paying homage to the ‘old daddy of rebel writing’

Who could imagine, in these times, that my beloved deep-red home state of Missouri once harbored one of the leaders of a radical, left-wing literary movement that gave rise to some of the late twentieth century’s most acclaimed writers?

In the heart of Little Dixie, a self-taught writer’s words took him from the rubble and rabble of Monkey Nest, a coal mining village just outside my hometown of Moberly, Missouri, to literary fame during the Great Depression. Jack Conroy‘s novel about the working class, called The Disinherited, took him to the pinnacle, but too quickly he fell into neglected writer status. Too independent for Communist Party orthodoxy, Conroy butted heads with what he called the “New York intelligentsia,” and eventually his brand of Heartland socialism fell out of favor. I hope my recent essay about Conroy will help raise awareness of his crucial role in creating an important literary movement in America.

Published in 1933, The Disinherited chronicles the sojourn of a protagonist who, much like Conroy, worked backbreaking jobs throughout the Midwest in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The story followed Conroy’s own life so closely it might be characterized as autofiction today. The book earned Conroy great accolades, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935, and his work as an editor of two left-wing literary magazines, Rebel Poet and The Anvil, made him even more influential as a mentor to other writers and the de facto father of the proletarian “worker-writer” movement of the era. His magazines also provided a platform for other working-class writers, as well as Blacks, women, and other marginalized voices, a platform that, for some, led to even greater fame.

Conroy was, as Richard Wright called him, the “old daddy of rebel writing.” In my recent essay in the literary magazine Merion West–“‘A Witness to the Times’: Jack Conroy and the Proletarian Writers Movement“–I argue that The Disinherited is as important a Great Depression novel as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and that his work as a literary editor and mentor was as important as his novel, if not more so.

“Steinbeck’s epic … vividly portrays the economic and societal upheaval that faced farm families of that era,” I write. But:

The Disinherited presents the Great Depression through a different lens. … Stylistically, The Disinherited is crude and unpolished, much like the characters and situations Conroy presents. Despite Conroy’s self-taught, rough-hewn writing style and the book’s episodic narrative, The Disinherited presents an unfiltered view of the American worker of that era. It gives voice to the marginalized factory and railroad workers, miners, bricklayers, and ditch diggers. Although overshadowed by The Grapes of Wrath, it remains a notable example of Depression-era literary realism and a singular work of the worker-writer movement that briefly flourished in the 1930s but essentially vanished by the onset of World War II.

If we are to better understand the forces at work in today’s economy and the struggles of modern workers, we would do well to bring Conroy’s story and works out from the shadows.

This project has been a labor of love for me. I’ve been obsessed with Conroy since I first learned about him, which, alas, was about a decade after I’d left Moberly for college and career. I learned about “The Sage of Moberly” from Douglas Wixson, an English professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology, where I did PR.

Wixson’s biography on Conroy is meticulously researched but written in a conversational, non-academic style. After first reading the biography thirty-plus years ago, I became obsessed with Conroy and read everything I could find about the man, including his own writings. Wixson also wrote introductions to a later edition of The Disinherited and a collection of Conroy writings called The Weed King & Other Stories. These books, as well as a hard-to-find collection co-edited by Conroy called Writers in Revolt: The Anvil Anthology, 1933-1940 and several online sources, helped immensely in my research for this essay.

I hope you’ll take a few minutes to read the essay and let me know what you think.