Depression Books

“The story flowed like a torrent. The margin bell chimed almost staccato, the roller turned with almost piston-like continuity, the pages sprang up almost like blobs of batter from a pancake skillet. The beer kept rising in the glass and, contradictorily, steadily falling lower. The cigarettes gave up their ghosts, long thing gray ghosts, in good cause; the mortality rate was terrible.”

That’s pulp fiction scribe, Cornell Woolrich, describing the Depression-era writing lifestyle in “Penny-A-Worder.” Watching the stock market slide and the writing lay-offs continue, we should keep his words pasted on our laptops.

If you need more literary models for surviving economic woes, Gawker is creating a list of literary books about economic collapse. We are adding Woolrich to the list, but chime in with your own examples of literary financial ruin. Dig it: “If you want hope, don’t talk to an economist, ask a novelist. Fiction writers tend to have a more optimistic view: once they’ve thrust characters into a financial abyss, they are forced to script a path out of it.”

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