Nobody Starves

New York: Longmans, Green and Co.. Very Good-. 1932. First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [a good sound copy, slight weakening to front hinge, some external soiling and a bit of fading and light staining to the spine; one-time owner's inked name and address label on front endpaper]. Novel about a young married couple, Molly and Bill, who are struggling to establish a life and home for themselves in Michigan as Bill seeks employment in the auto industry, only to have their modest dreams of a happy life shattered by the onset of the Depression. A stark depiction of a couple of ordinary people gradually worn down by the crushing weight of poverty, and the desperation that propels them towards a tragic end, it was somewhat pretentiously blurbed as "the first important American novel about the Depression" and "a powerful book, Dreiserian in its wealth of detail, but recalling Hugo's Les Miserables (of which it is in some sense a modern counterpart) in its deep probing into the heart of tortured humanity." (These quotes are from the dust jacket, NOT present on this copy, sorry.) The author, a onetime office worker, had been a "New Masses" contributor and had also done some undercover journalistic research into workplace conditions (which clearly informed the early chapters of her book, in which Molly is employed in a pottery works). Her third novel, it was critically well-received and also sold well, garnering praise from the likes of Sinclair Lewis, Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair -- but Brody published only one more novel, "Cash Item" (1933), and aside from tracking down a number of book reviews she wrote for the New York Times in the 1940s, I've been unable to determine why she stopped writing fiction, or what ultimately became of her. (The town of "Micmac," by the way, in which much of the novel's action takes place, is generally thought to be a fictionalized version of Flint, Michigan.) .