Collecting Depression America

The Great Depression marked a crucial moment when the institutionalization of archival practices accelerated and consolidated. Returning to this era through the lens of writers affiliated with Depression left movements, Sarah Ehlers recasts the 1930s in surprising ways, revealing how diverse forms of collecting included various documentary practices and stakes that have dropped out of dominant histories. Ehlers unsettles long-held assumptions about Depression-era literary culture by portraying the forgotten and unacknowledged ways left writers resisted official archival logics.

Examining four sites of collection—the trash heap, the home, the museum, and the reading room—Ehlers shows how each offers a unique context for understanding how 1930s writers negotiated the limitations of, and generated alternatives to, existing regimes of representation and arrangement. Innovatively reframing the way we understand modernity’s emerging documentary culture, Collecting Depression America recalibrates our understanding of the past and, at the same time, challenges the very practices we use to do so.