George Packer: The New Depression Journalism: The New Yorker In early 1931, Edmund Wilson left his desk job as the literary editor of The New Republic to travel around the stricken country and write a series of articles on the effects of the Depression, then in its second year. The publication of "Axel's Castle" was about to make him America's most famous literary critic, but the stock-market crash diverted Wilson's attention from Mallarmé and Joyce. He was in an apocalyptic mood. The very structure of American society seemed to be collapsing: it was the end of industrial capitalism, of representative democracy, and the start of something radically new. He urged the magazine's readers to shake themselves loose from the liberalism of John Dewey and Herbert Croly, move left, and "take Communism away from the Communists." There was nothing unusual in those days about an owl-eyed literary man from the landed gentry, Princeton "16, showing up in Virginia coal country. Sherwood Anderson was there, too - "all full of Communism," Wilson reported to his friend John Dos Passos. He doesn't know much about it, but the idea has given him a powerful afflatus. He has a new girl, a radical Y.W.C.A. secretary, who took him around to the mills. He is writing a novel with a Communist hero and I have never seen him so much aroused. After Dos Passos finished the second novel of his "U.S.A." trilogy, he joined a group of writers led by Theodore Dreiser on a trip to Harlan County, Kentucky, where they held hearings on the miners" living conditions, and were charged by local authorities with "criminal syndicalism." Dreiser, who had brought his own new girl on the trip, was also indicted for adultery; he denied it, to reporters back in New York, on the ground of impotence. When Wilson visited Kentucky, delivering food and clothing to striking miners, he was part of a group including his New Republic colleague Malcolm Cowley, the writer Waldo Frank, and the future music producer John Hammond (who later signed Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Bruce Springsteen to Columbia Records). Wilson and his comrades braved heavily armed sheriff's deputies, before being driven across the state line amid death threats. . . .