'[P]eople lacking in material things’: Valuing the Working Class in Lenski’s Regionals
Title and/or Affiliation
Maggie E. Morris Davis, Illinois State University
Presenter Bio
Maggie E. Morris Davis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Illinois State University. Her research focuses on class and childhood/youth and how, as social constructions, representations of these concepts enter not only our language, culture, and literature, but also shape our classrooms, curricula, and pedagogy.
Session
Panel: Valuing the Working Class
Location
Zoom
Start Date
28-6-2024 11:00 AM
End Date
28-6-2024 12:15 PM
Abstract
Lois Lenski typed a long response to Marie L. Ram’s 1959 dissertation, “An Analysis of the Lois Lenski Literature from a Sociological Point of View,” in which she offered an extended critique that Ram had “not allowed for virtues and advantages in backwoods culture.” “As my stories themselves so clearly point out,” she wrote, “people lacking in material things are often closer to nature, richer in spiritual values, simpler and more elemental (‘closer to God’) in their thinking than people with more advantages, more education and more opportunities." As evidenced in this response as well as in her children’s fiction, Lenski explicitly assigns value to poor and working-class people. This paper considers Lenski’s Regionals, a series of seventeen books written for young people between 1940s-1960s, by 1) offering close readings of Lenski’s language to describe poor and working-class families as well as her illustrations of poor and working-class young people, particularly in the 1954 Project Boy and the 1959 Coal Camp Girl; and 2) reading these moments alongside archival materials first gathered by Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) fieldworkers in preparation for the publication of the American Guide Series (1937-1941), which Lenski consulted in writing her Regionals. Scholars such as Julia Pond have worked to note the parallels between Lenski’s Regionals and the FWP guidebook series, both “fraught with the same ideological inconsistencies” (53).Z
'[P]eople lacking in material things’: Valuing the Working Class in Lenski’s Regionals
Zoom
Lois Lenski typed a long response to Marie L. Ram’s 1959 dissertation, “An Analysis of the Lois Lenski Literature from a Sociological Point of View,” in which she offered an extended critique that Ram had “not allowed for virtues and advantages in backwoods culture.” “As my stories themselves so clearly point out,” she wrote, “people lacking in material things are often closer to nature, richer in spiritual values, simpler and more elemental (‘closer to God’) in their thinking than people with more advantages, more education and more opportunities." As evidenced in this response as well as in her children’s fiction, Lenski explicitly assigns value to poor and working-class people. This paper considers Lenski’s Regionals, a series of seventeen books written for young people between 1940s-1960s, by 1) offering close readings of Lenski’s language to describe poor and working-class families as well as her illustrations of poor and working-class young people, particularly in the 1954 Project Boy and the 1959 Coal Camp Girl; and 2) reading these moments alongside archival materials first gathered by Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) fieldworkers in preparation for the publication of the American Guide Series (1937-1941), which Lenski consulted in writing her Regionals. Scholars such as Julia Pond have worked to note the parallels between Lenski’s Regionals and the FWP guidebook series, both “fraught with the same ideological inconsistencies” (53).Z