Josephine Herbst, Pity is Not Enough

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In 1930 the novelist Josephine Herbst travelled to the Soviet Union with her husband, writer John Herrmann, to attend the International Congress of Revolutionary Writers in Kharkov. While the conference has been criticised as laying down a party line on proletarian fiction, it had a liberating rather than a restrictive effect on Herbst. In an article about the conference for

The New Republic

(April 29, 1931), she wrote, “To me it was new to learn th[at] subject matter, to be valuable, need not even deal with actual workers, so long as the writer is cognisant of the Marxian theory of class.” In fact, the trilogy that Herbst published over the next eight years applied Marxist theory to the history of her family, fictionalised as the Trexlers. Thus, the trilogy is both autobiographical…

1447 words

Citation: Hubler, Angela E.. "Pity is Not Enough". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 March 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2824, accessed 28 March 2024.]

2824 Pity is Not Enough 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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