Description

12-SESSION CLASS with CRAIG CHISHOLM & MICHAEL LARDNER

While Jay Gatsby epitomized the hyper-indulgent decadence of the 1% during the 1920’s, many Americans had no choice but to move about the country in search of a sustainable job and a new place to maybe make a future. e bubble of the Gatsby’s burst, many ruined bourgeois plunging from the nancial towers to splat on the streets around Wall Street as their fortunes became but pennies. These hundreds of suicides do not compare to the unfolding of tragedy for millions of Americans, uprooted from work and home, cast to the dusty winds trying to nd a place to work and stay. is summer we will read four classics of this boom gone bust as represented in American ction as well as some poems from the era in order to better understand the conditions of American life and labor and also shed light on what our current experiences are.

June 15
Introduction and selected poetry of the era

June 22, 29 and July 6
Blood on the Forge by William Attaway

July 13, 20 and 27
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

August 3, 10 and 17
Christ in Concrete by Pietro de Donato

August 24 and 31
Yonnondio: From the Thirties by Tillie Olsen

CRAIG CHISHOLM is a writer and editor at Gigantic Sequins.
is year Craig has been active with the studies and
events with the Precarity Task Force.

MICHAEL LARDNER has spent years doing typography and
during the summers coordinates these literature sessions.