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# “A Witness to the Times”: Jack Conroy and the Proletarian Writers’ Movement
- URL: https://www.merionwest.com/a-witness-to-the-times-jack-conroy-and-the-proletarian-writers-movement/
- Published: 2026-10-15T14:04:18.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-15T15:25:24.000Z
- Description: Jack Conroy emerged from the Great Depression as one of the leading “worker-writers,” chronicling the lives of laborers while resisting pressure from the Communist literary establishment. Andrew Careaga revisits Conroy’s life, work, and place in the largely forgotten proletarian writers’ movement.
- Author: Andrew Careaga
- Tags: Arts Essays

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By 1935, the United States was mired in the Great Depression—millions out of work, banks insolvent, farms foreclosed upon, and factories shuttered from coast to coast. For writer [Jack Conroy](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jack-Conroy?ref=merionwest.com), it should have been the best of times. His 1933 novel [*The Disinherited*](https://upress.missouri.edu/9780826207708/the-disinherited/?ref=merionwest.com) had positioned Conroy, a Missouri native born into a coal mining family, as the leader of a new literary movement. In 1935, he received a $2,000 [Guggenheim Fellowship](https://www.gf.org/fellows/jack-conroy/?ref=merionwest.com) and was a keynote speaker at the first [League of American Writers Congress](https://revolutionsnewsstand.com/2024/03/13/the-league-of-american-writers-meets-from-new-masses-vol-15-no-6-may-7-1935/?ref=merionwest.com) in New York City. On the heels of his novel’s success and the growing influence of his literary magazine [*The Anvil*](https://modernistmagazines.org/american/the-anvil/?ref=merionwest.com), Conroy became known as the quintessential “worker-writer,” an author who toiled as a manual laborer by day and wrote by night.

But acclaim did not pay the bills. By then in his late thirties and married with three children, Conroy was broke. The headline of an April 26, 1935, Associated Press report in the *Jefferson City (Missouri) Post-Tribune* aptly summarized Conroy’s dilemma: "[Guggenheim Prize Winner Wishes He Had Factory Job](https://shsmo.newspapers.com/image/19507010/?match=1&terms=%22jack%20conroy%22&search-id=eaea4775-3bd8-49e2-a63e-c5228ce8233d&search-rank=6&ref=merionwest.com)."

It has been nearly a century since the October 1929 stock market crash sent the United States spiraling into the Great Depression, and nearly ninety years since publication of John Steinbeck’s [*The Grapes of Wrath*](https://www.amazon.com/Grapes-Wrath-John-Steinbeck/dp/0143039431/?ref=merionwest.com), the novel many consider the ultimate portrayal of those hard times. Steinbeck’s epic of the Joads, a destitute Oklahoma farm family, and their migration toward the promise of a better life in California vividly portrays the economic and societal upheaval that faced farm families of that era.

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*The Disinherited* presents the Great Depression through a different lens. In the novel—or autofiction, as it might be called today—Conroy focused on the lives of transient laborers he met and worked alongside in Midwest factories and rail yards during the 1920s and early 1930s. 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.

**A Socialist in Spirit**

Conroy was more socialist in spirit than in letter. As his biographer Douglas Wixson notes in [*Worker-Writer in America: Jack Conroy and the Tradition of Midwestern Literary Radicalism, 1898-1990*](https://www.amazon.com/Worker-Writer-America-Tradition-Midwestern-Radicalism/dp/025202043X/?ref=merionwest.com), Conroy never joined the Communist Party but was loosely affiliated with the East Coast communists who ran the party apparatus. He relied on them to help get the literary magazines he ran into the hands of the masses. Yet he never fit their mold. He derided the East Coasters as “New York intelligentsia,” and he and other working-class writers of the Midwest were too independent for the East Coast contingent’s liking. These proletarian writers called themselves the “rebel poets,” and Conroy, who was more interested in presenting the plight of the worker than in promoting political ideology, was likely the most rebellious of them all. Richard Wright, who owed much of his early success to Conroy, even called him the "[old daddy of rebel writing](https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/jack-conroy-and-the-lost-era-of-proletarian-literature/?ref=merionwest.com)."

**A Rebel Writer’s Origins**

Born in a mining camp near Moberly, Missouri, Conroy discovered the struggles of the working class early in life. His father and two brothers died in mining-related incidents, and his first job, at age fourteen, was as a laborer in Moberly’s Wabash Railroad yards. It was a typical employment path for the town’s young men, writes Wixson in his introduction to a collection of Conroy’s short writings, [*The Weed King & Other Stories*](https://www.amazon.com/Weed-King-Other-Stories/dp/0882081861/?ref=merionwest.com).

Conroy’s brief railroad career ended in 1922 following the failure of a railroad workers' strike he helped organize, Wixson notes in *Worker-Writer in America*. That year, Wixson continues, Conroy married Elizabeth Gladys Kelly and enrolled at the University of Missouri in nearby Columbia. He left after one semester "in objection to the military service requirements" and spent much of the next decade drifting from city to city, working in low-wage jobs in mining, bricklaying, farming, construction, and factory work. He spent his nights reading the works of Jack London, Maxim Gorky, and Theodore Dreiser—writers of a socialist bent who influenced his writing style and political philosophy—while penning his own essays, short stories, and “sketches” for literary journals and union publications.

His gritty tales of the working class, seasoned with factory-floor and mining camp folk tales, appeared mainly in left-wing or union publications outside the mainstream, though several landed in the pages of [*The American Mercury*](https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/communication-and-mass-media/american-mercury-magazine/?ref=merionwest.com), a literary magazine edited by essayist and cultural critic H.L. Mencken. Conroy also corresponded with like-minded, "intellectually marooned" writers who, like him, "found expression in little magazines that had begun to appear as meshpoints in an expanding network of communication," Wixson writes in *Worker-Writer in America*. Many of these writers, including Sherwood Anderson and Langston Hughes, joined Conroy in a loose confederation of writers known as the "Rebel Poets."

In February of 1931, Mencken published Conroy’s sketch "Hard Winter," the first of six Conroy stories he would publish. By the time that story appeared, Conroy had returned to Moberly "to throw myself on the mercy of relatives" while continuing to work on his novel, he writes in his introduction to the 1982 edition of *The Disinherited*. He picked up some "short-lived, and usually backbreaking" jobs around town, but his wife Gladys was the family breadwinner, even though she brought home "seldom…more than $6 a week" from her shoe factory job.

After fourteen rejections, *The Disinherited* was published by Covici-Friede in November of 1933\. Praised as well as panned, the novel details first-person protagonist Larry Donovan’s quest for "his own voice among a confusion of voices in mine, mill, and factory" before he returns home, "where he finally stumbles into a purpose" as a labor organizer.

Some reviewers summarized the book as a "novelized autobiography." Conroy did not dispute that characterization. Conroy, in a 1963 interview in the Chicago *Daily News’ Panorama* magazine, said, "I describe myself as a witness to the times, not as a novelist. And that’s what I prefer to be known as."

**"Angry and Shabby Jeremiahs"**

If *The Disinherited* was "a witness to the times," the literary magazines Conroy published were the voice of the disinherited. He worked with poets Ralph Cheyney and Lucia Trent to launch an annual literary anthology of radical writing, called *Unrest*, which was published in 1929, 1930, and 1931\. Building on the momentum of *Unrest*, Conroy became editor of *Rebel Poet*. Conroy describes *Rebel Poet* as one of many publications created by "angry and shabby Jeremiahs in a score of American cities" who "began…to issue publications fired with revolt against a system that could permit men, women and children to face starvation in the richest country ever inhabited by human beings."

In a letter published in the June 1931 issue of [*New Masses*](http://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1931/v07n01-jun-1931-New-Masses.pdf?ref=merionwest.com)—the Communist Party USA’s chief literary magazine—Conroy wrote that *Rebel Poet*’s purpose was "to demonstrate that poets can and will become an integral part of the revolutionary movement." He was adamant the magazine would maintain political independence. "Affiliated with no political party," began *Rebel Poet*’s "manifesto of principles," as Conroy restated them in *Writers in Revolt*:

> "we champion the cause of the weak and defenseless, we combat the greed of industrial barons who are converting American laborers into abject serfs, we decry the spirit of intolerance that endeavors to abrogate the inherent rights of free speech and assembly...We ridicule the musty echoes of the *fin de siècle* slogan, 'Art for Art’s Sake,' and inscribe on our banner: 'ART FOR HUMANITY’S SAKE.'"

*Rebel Poet* lasted only one year. Conroy’s independent streak ran counter to the East Coast communists’ politics. The magazine’s "all-inclusive liberalism distressed ultra-revolutionary (Philip) Rahv," a New York literary critic and essayist who co-founded the influential [*Partisan Review*](https://hdl.handle.net/2144/52382?ref=merionwest.com). Rahv and his supporters "insisted that the magazine 'identify itself with the *avant garde* of the proletariat,'" Conroy continues. Rather than bow to pressure, Conroy invoked "the 'executive privilege' conferred on me" when he succeeded Cheyney as president of the Rebel Poets and "declared the New York chapter (of the Rebel Poets) dissolved and the magazine suspended."

Conroy’s "Midwest upbringing differed greatly from the New York faction of communists who controlled much of the publishing process," [writes Lyuba Basin](https://blog.lib.utah.edu/book-of-the-week-the-anvil-proletarian-fiction-magazine/?ref=merionwest.com), a rare books librarian at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library. He "was a 'rebel' in the sense that he was reluctant to delve too deeply in political theory, or spend too much time thinking in abstract terms," Basin adds. "He believed that the primary goal of *Rebel Poet*, and proletarian literature in general, should be focused on 'the concrete terms of human existence.' For this kind of thinking, Conroy was accused of being too individualistic, and Party support of his editorial position dwindled."

***The Anvil* Strikes**

A year later, Conroy launched *The Anvil*. Bearing the subtitle "Stories for Workers," the magazine’s creed, penned by Conroy, reinforced the worker-writer philosophy to favor "crude vigor" over "polished banality."

As Conroy explains in *Writers in Revolt*, *The Anvil* became "the pioneer of proletarian magazines devoted solely to creative work." It also became a platform for many talented, diverse, and marginalized voices, including women and African Americans. Some of them, Richard Wright and Nelson Algren among them, would later find mainstream success.

"Much of the stuff we published in *The Anvil* was rough-hewn and awkward," Conroy writes in *Writers in Revolt*, "but bitter and alive from the furnace of experience—and from participants, not observers, in most instances."

Conroy published the writings of marginalized writers "in a time when other editors would have turned a blind eye to such content," Basin writes. "He was highlighting civil-rights issues decades before they became mainstream."

However, Conroy’s magazine, like Conroy himself, antagonized the East Coast communists, who controlled the means of distribution. *The Anvil*’s run ended in 1935, when it was absorbed by the party’s main literary journal *Partisan Review*. "A rather explicit threat that rejection of the merger would bring an end to the CP distribution persuaded me that it was time to throw in the towel," Conroy would later explain.

**The End of a Movement**

While the careers of some *Anvil* contributors flourished, Conroy’s literary success stalled. His second novel, [*A World to Win*](https://www.amazon.com/World-Win-Jack-Conroy/dp/B0011ZHSOE/?ref=merionwest.com), was published in 1935—the same year he won the Guggenheim—but did not achieve the same acclaim as *The Disinherited*. Following *A World to Win*’s lackluster reception, Conroy abandoned all attempts at novel writing and, in Wixson’s words, fell into "neglected writer" status. He took a job with the federally funded Missouri Writers’ Project in 1935, and then, at Algren’s urging, moved to Chicago to join the Illinois Writers’ Project. There, he collaborated with the black novelist Arna Bontemps to produce a study of black migration, [*They Seek a City*](https://www.amazon.com/They-Seek-City-Arna-Bontemps/dp/B0007E2JSU/?ref=merionwest.com), which appeared in 1945\. With Algren, he attempted a third proletarian magazine, [*The New Anvil*](https://www.britannica.com/topic/New-Anvil?ref=merionwest.com), in 1939\. It folded after six issues.

The onset of World War II spelled the end of the proletarian writers’ movement, which soon became a lost feature of American [literary history](https://www.bunkhistory.org/resources/jack-conroy-and-the-lost-era-of-proletarian-literature?ref=merionwest.com). The subsequent Cold War and the nation’s antipathy toward anything hinting at socialism further pushed Conroy and the worker-writer movement to the sidelines. Yet at a time when economic insecurity and the dignity of work have again become central political concerns, Conroy’s insistence on depicting working life in concrete human terms feels newly relevant.

Before leaving Chicago for Moberly in 1965, Conroy worked as an encyclopedia editor for Sears, reviewed books for the *Chicago Sun* and the *Daily Defender*, and taught fiction at Columbia College in Chicago. In 1984, his hometown honored him with a communitywide celebration, and he died there in 1990.

While his own writings may largely be neglected, Conroy’s work as a literary editor and mentor was instrumental in launching the careers of twentieth-century writers like Richard Wright and Nelson Algren, who in turn have advanced the cause of the worker-writer in American literature.

### Andrew Careaga is a writer from Rolla, Missouri, who grew up in Jack Conroy’s hometown of Moberly, Missouri.