Sad Men: NYC Writers and the Great Depression
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Wabash Magazine just published “Sad Men,” an essay I wrote about writers struggling in New York City during the Great Depression. I’ve been writing about Depression-era NYC all year, from Kenneth Fearing’s poetry to Alice Neel’s nudes.
Here’s an excerpt: “I watched Mad Men on television—the AMC drama following the decadent lifestyles of New York City advertising executives in the early 1960s. I wondered how anybody in our world could relate to that prosperous period. The show explores the suburban landscapes chronicled in books by John Updike and John Cheever, the middle-class scribes who wiped Bodenheim’s generation off the literary map. Those writers couldn’t help me last winter. Instead, I gravitated to a bunch of Great Depression misfits who endured the same problems that we face now. I called them Sad Men.”
If you want to read more, my work has appeared in Granta, Salon.com, and The Believer. You can email Jason Boog here or read my resume here. Welcome to the online home for my stories-–no more monkeying around with scattered web addresses. You can follow my daily posts at GalleyCat, mediabistro.com’s publishing website, or follow me on Twitter and Facebook.