In January 1929, the novelist and critic Mike Gold published a manifesto in the socialist magazine New Masses titled “Go Left, Young Writers!” In it, Gold argued that the American democratic project suffered from a broad inability to imagine the lives of working-class and poor people. It was necessary to inject proletarian voices into the media so that people could encounter the reality of working people’s lives as they themselves saw it.

One obstacle was that writing had earned a reputation as a somewhat otherworldly endeavor. Opaque and rarified, writing’s secret genius was inaccessible to all but a handful of highly educated and innately talented elites. Many self-important writers promoted this impression themselves, talking about their craft with an air of snobbery and territorial insularity.

Gold, who would become the architect of twentieth-century America’s proletarian literary movement, argued that this was nonsense. Writing was “not any more mystic in its origin than a ham sandwich.”