Josephine Herbst, Pity is Not Enough

Angela E. Hubler (Kansas State University)

Ed. by Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1933

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

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In 1930 the novelist Josephine Herbst travelled to the Soviet Union with her husband, writer John Herrmann, to attend the International Congress of Revolutionary Writers in Kharkov. While the conference has been criticised as laying down a party line on proletarian fiction, it had a liberating rather than a restrictive effect on Herbst. In an article about the conference for

The New Republic

(April 29, 1931), she wrote, “To me it was new to learn th[at] subject matter, to be valuable, need not even deal with actual workers, so long as the writer is cognisant of the Marxian theory of class.” In fact, the trilogy that Herbst published over the next eight years applied Marxist theory to the history of her family, fictionalised as the Trexlers. Thus, the trilogy is both autobiographical…

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1447 words

Citation: Hubler, Angela E.. "Pity is Not Enough". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 March 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2824, accessed 21 November 2024.]

Josephine Herbst, Pity is Not Enough

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