MY FRIEND, I am going to tell you the story of my life, as you wish; and if it were only the story of my life I think I would not tell it; for what is one man that he should make much of his winters, even when they bend him like a heavy snow?” So begins John G. Neihardt's 1932 account of a Sioux Indian's oral remembrances, Black Elk Speaks. It is one of many cross-cultural ventures from the 1930s that sought to transform the speech of the disinherited into a more lasting written form.

Although it has never been examined as such, Black Elk Speaks is fully representative of what Alfred Kazin called “the preponderance of descriptive nonfiction” that typified 1930s writing. The (overlapping) genres of documentary, ethnography, oral history, folklore, journalism – as well as reality-based fiction – became the Depression era's characteristic avenues for representing a widespread societal preoccupation with the plight of the disempowered. The 1930s were a time when not only writers sponsored by the Works Progress Administration, but also scores of other ethnographers, documentarians, and journalists sought to preserve oral perspectives they perceived as rapidly vanishing. They thus traveled into the field and recorded black, American Indian, migrant worker, tenant farmer, and immigrant voices. Citing the real voices of living subjects as their authoritative sources, thirties writers often produced timely social commentary designed to shock a middle-class readership into greater awareness of widespread suffering.

During the thirties, insightful cultural critics recognized that, for countless American writers, documenting society had supplanted the project of creating fiction.