Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression
By Morris Dickstein
WW Norton, £22, 576 pages
FT Bookshop price: £17.60

The final pages of Morris Dickstein’s monumental panorama of the 1930s, Dancing in the Dark, present a neat analogy between The Wizard of Oz, the Hollywood fantasy film released in 1939, and The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s grim novel of rural poverty, published to popular acclaim the same year.

Like Steinbeck’s Joad family, Dorothy and her dog Toto are uprooted by disaster, leaving their bleak rural home to take to an uncertain road. The Joads head west from Oklahoma, only to find more misery in the California orange groves. Their story seared a lasting image of the era’s rural poverty into the popular consciousness.

But Dorothy and her friends have a happier trip. They learn that they carry within themselves the individual virtues to collectively overcome their fears – helped by a benign wizard who, writes Dickstein, could even be a “stand-in for FDR”, the president of national reconstruction.

For Dickstein, a professor of English and drama at the City University of New York, “a culture’s forms of escape, if they can be called escape, are as significant and revealing as its social criticism”.

His book is an epic effort to draw out the common themes of a prolific decade, analysing works as diverse as the filmed choreography of Busby Berkeley, the music of Woody Guthrie and Aaron Copland, and the gritty social realism of Walker Evans’ photographs of poor sharecroppers.

The decade was marked by recognition of the failure of the American Dream says Dickstein. Even the hard-working poor stayed poor, while the middle-class faced, for the first time, the risk of falling. Writers and artists wrestled with notions of individual and collective responsibility for success and failure as the country saw that hard work would not necessarily make anyone rich any more.

Dickstein argues that the arts of the decade mapped its political shifts of mood with a particular closeness. As the US economy slumped, there was a focus on the idea of the victim, such as the drifter forced into a life of crime . The New Deal, he suggests, brought more collective optimism in the virtue of the common man, seen in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess or Copland’s populist works, such as Billy the Kid.

Dickstein extracts and expands the broad themes he sees in the arts of the decade in a series of detailed critical assessments. Yet how many people will have read Mike Gold’s 1930 novel Jews Without Money, set amid the slums of New York’s Lower East Side at the turn of the century? But Dickstein argues that Gold’s book and Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep, set the scene for the proletarian novels of the Depression by writing about the physical experience of living in poverty, rather than decrying it from afar; these books found an audience among the many Americans confronting the scale of poverty in their country.

He carries the reader onwards with fine writing and enthusiasm for his material. But at more than 500 pages, this is a long journey for anyone not already familiar with the range of books, films and plays he covers. Alongside thematic cultural analysis, his close-up assessments of the artistic merits of works such as F Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night or Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, add to the vastness of the enterprise.

The cumulative weight of the cultural moments he covers reminds us of the profound shock the Depression delivered to America’s view of itself, and to its self-esteem. The resulting images, stories and songs helped create a new view of collective national wellbeing that lasted until the deregulation of the Reagan administration in the 1980s. Even without its merits, this work would probably win prizes for timeliness.

Jonathan Birchall is the FT’s US retail correspondent