Customer Reviews

Night of the Poor.

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an engaging tale of a young man coming of age in the 1930s US Depression. Tom is a sheltered youth working on his uncle's Wisconsin farm when his uncle dies and he must return to his father's farm in Texas. Pete, one of the farm hands, suggests that they could get to Texas together on the $33 that Tom has. Tom and Pete join an army of out of work drifters crisscrossing the land, working at odd jobs for their meals and sleeping under the stars. Tom loses Pete along the way and falls in love with Lucy, a young runaway girl, only to lose her too.

Radcliffe Squires in his 1964 book, FREDERIC PROKOSCH, says, "Night of the Poor aims at combining a story of an innocent youth's experience with an allegory of America rendered bitter and aimless by the economic depression of the 1930's." Mr. Squires goes on to say "the boy's groping toward maturity and understanding embodies the notion of youthful America which now must also put aside pioneer frontiers like childish things and grow up." This is an excellent summation of the novel. Sadly there is not much criticism available of Prokosch novels. Squires is the only person to write a book about the author and he calls this book, I think very undeservedly, one of Prokosch's poorest novels. It deserves a second reading by American readers.

Written at the end of the Depression on the eve of the US entry into World War II, the novel portrays the devastating effects of the Depression on the US. All along the way Tom finds people down on their luck and without resources, pushed to the limits of their endurance. The people are the strange refuse of a society cut to the bone by poverty. Fortunately, the author is able to capture the generous and loving spirit of the American people even at their darkest hour. Yet this is no fairy tale America. Along the way the boy witnesses a murder, a rape, and a lynching. Prokosch hints at a new nation being born out of this painful period. His image of a nation coming to maturity as revealed through the maturing vision of a youthful innocent takes on a mystical and dream-like quality.

Possibly the people of the time were too close to the reality of the events to appreciate this work. Possibly on the eve of war with Germany, the US was turning its back on a writer of German heritage. Whatever the reasons the novel didn't succeed when first published, it is today an insightful look at a country caught between the Depression of the 1930s and the World War of the 1940s.