Possibly of interest to some, re: learning more about the historical context for Lovecraft and the Great Depression. A new book by John Marsh, The Emotional Life of the Great Depression, from Oxford University Press. Rejecting the usual approach of a ghoulish focus on ‘the despair of the 1930s’, the book…

explores the 1930s through other, equally essential emotions: righteousness, panic, fear, awe, love, and hope.

The author appears to delight in Walt Whitman, also being the author of In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself.

Sadly I can’t find a single public review of The Emotional Life of the Great Depression, even on Amazon. I even looked on Good Reads, a site I usually disregard.

News of the book leads me to recall my elderly history teacher once impressing on his class, way back, that the 1930s in the UK were actually a time when many had a good time, got ahead, worked hard, were relieved from drudgery by labour-saving inventions, saw amazing cinema and read lively magazines, enjoyed better health and healthcare, revelled in public libraries, moved to beautiful new and affordable suburbs, were broadly optimistic about the future (they didn’t know a World War was coming) and generally unaffected by all the hand-wringing and maudlin machinations among the intellectuals. He had actually been there in 1930s Midlands Britain, albeit as a lad, and had later studied the period. He felt the need to enlighten his students because of the distorting effects of the stark and grimy black-and-white depiction of 1930s — pit-head and dust-bowl poverty, etc. — that had been relentlessly promoted in the media from about the 1960s until the 1990s.