Novels emanating from the radical left shared some of the detective novel’s cynicism and most of Horace McCoy’s bitterness. Behind them lay a native tradition that reached back at least to I. K. Friedman’s By Bread Alone (1901) and The Radical (1907), Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), Charlotte Teller’s The Cage (1907), and Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908). But reform was what held the left together, and reform depended on hope. In 1937 – two years after Kenneth Burke urged the American Writers’ Congress to make “the people” rather than “the worker” their “basic symbol of exhortation and allegiance” – Nathan Asch published The Road: In Search of America. Both parts of Asch’s double adventure, of seeing “America” and then writing a book about it, unfold as a search for “the people,” representations of whom he finds in a young Mexican couple in Denver, Colorado, who live lives of resigned desperation; in a middle-aged man in Eureka, California, who hopes to become sick enough to qualify for charity before he and his wife starve to death; in Henry John Zorn, who has been left to rot away “underneath Montana”; and in a black family in Lost Prairie, Arkansas, who live “in a sievelike empty house amid a world of cotton.” Such people, Asch insists, are not “exceptional” cases but “usual and everyday and common.” Trapped in misery and dispossession, they resemble the residents of a flophouse that Sherwood Anderson describes in Puzzled America (1935), where people lie breathing “in and out together” in “one gigantic sigh.”