By confining the focus of his literary survey of 1930s America to fiction and nonfiction, Peter Conn risks presenting a frustratingly incomplete portrait – especially ironic given his assertion in the introduction that the majority of scholars take such a reductive view of the 1930s as “to reduce a complex palette to a monotone” (6). Yet considering the inclusion of some comment on the decade's drama and history painting, and notwithstanding the absence of any real discussion of the era's rich poetical output, the analysis is impressively broad. Arguing against the common critical assumption that the 1930s may be characterized in cultural terms largely by leftist aesthetics and politics, Conn emphasizes the enormous ideological and imaginative diversity of the United States in the 1930s. However, Conn's focus is specific, and his literary history is driven by the sustained force of the past on the American imagination. As the debate grew during the 1930s over the meaning of America, the urge to create a “usable past” gained new significance, and Conn demonstrates how history was ever-present in the literary expression of the Depression decade.

Accordingly, chapters are arranged in order to illuminate what Conn calls the decade's “thick texture of ‘pastness’” (8). The first chapter ends with a note of positivism that infuses the entire book: Conn argues that whereas the 1920s were broadly characterized in terms of social criticism by “embittered estimates of the American scene” (32), the 1930s were met by the majority of American writers with optimism and resolve. Following chapters outline the ways in which the ensuing search for America allowed writers of various disciplines and calibres to engage with their country's past via biography, historical fiction and painting. The strength of Conn's achievement lies in his deft management of a wealth of material, and in his convincing and balanced examination of the works of writers from a broad spectrum of political and cultural backgrounds. In chapter 4, for example, discussion of the motives behind the numerous presidential biographies of the era leads to the consideration that the two biographies of Noah Webster added to the “intense reflection on the origins and meanings of the nation's identity” in that Webster “was the linguistic nationalist of the early Republic” (117). In chapter 5, analysis of the racial frameworks supporting explorations of the southern past brings to light parallels between the treatment of slaves during Reconstruction and black sharecroppers during the Depression, as well as the far-reaching effect of the oscillations in the debate between supporters and denigrators of black freedmen on the educative systems of America.

The focus of Conn's survey precludes any analysis of literature that did not in some way appeal to the past. As a result, his discussions of leftist and documentary responses constitute the weakest points of the book, sidestepping the aesthetic (and modernist) sophistication of those poets, documentarians, novelists and playwrights who sought to present contemporary social perspectives. That said, Conn demonstrates via sustained and lively analysis that the historical turn of the 1930s was a key and complex response to national economic collapse. The American 1930s seeks to recover the heterogeneous complexity of intellectual life at a time when present economic circumstances prompt us to reappraise our own literary lineage. As such, it serves as a valuable reference book for current and future generations of scholars in American studies.

Eldridge's American Culture in the 1930s provides a more comprehensive survey of the cultural output of the decade, adhering to the format of the established EUP series on Twentieth Century American Culture. Thus chapters offering an intelligently structured overview of 1930s literature and drama, film and photography, music and radio, art and design, and “New Deal culture” are interspersed three apiece with closer readings of influential texts, events and people in the form of “case studies.” Whilst less specific than Conn's review, Eldridge's survey nevertheless presents a detailed panorama of the period, drawing on extant scholarship by the likes of Michael Denning and David Kennedy to provide an insightful and fresh look at the major cultural forms of the era. Indeed, Eldridge's “Introduction: The Intellectual Context” serves as a more informative initiation into the cultural framework of the era than Conn's corresponding skim through the 1920s. Additionally, the development of American studies as a discipline during the 1930s – with its origins in a backward-looking reclamation of cultural heritage – is given due attention in Eldridge, but is noticeably absent in Conn.

The strongest parts of the book are the discussions of radio and Hollywood film (in fact, the book leans toward a treatment more of popular culture than of intellectual endeavours – a first indication of this being the cover: a film still of Henry Fonda from John Ford's adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath). Eldridge offers a perceptive and convincing account of the diversity within each mode of entertainment at the time, noting throughout that such variation should “caution against accepting any reductive readings of 1930s culture” (65). This is not to say that politically informed or reactive works are not discussed with dexterity; each chapter handles a different form of 1930s expression with a sure and light touch, and Eldridge's synchronic approach matches the multifarious ethos of the era very well.

There are necessarily many areas where the two books overlap; however, Conn's historical focus and Eldridge's wider cultural lens complement each other to provide a clear and vivid picture of the era's aesthetics. For example, where Conn explores the inherent and damaging racism in textual rehearsals of the white South's grievances during Reconstruction, such as Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, Eldridge stresses Mitchell's questioning of the “cultural hold awarded to fictive, legendary pasts” in her portrait of a heroine who draws “her courage from the future” (56). Likewise, Conn's treatment of Grant Wood highlights the way he “comically enacts the nation's decline” (71) in paintings such as Daughters of the Revolution, whilst Eldridge gives more space to the dichotomy in Wood's art between the expression of rooted experience and local knowledge, and his distaste for narrow regionalist interpretations of national culture. “Wood's Regionalism,” argues Eldridge, “was a notably pluralist vision” (139).

Although the book uncovers nothing new in terms of ideological and aesthetic perspectives on the decade's cultural output, it is the juxtapositions that Eldridge offers that incite interesting comparisons, and should serve to generate more research. American Culture in the 1930s therefore provides a challenging reference point for students and scholars alike.