I recently went through a phase of reading interwar left-wing Chicago novelists, basically James Farrell and Nelson Algren (who has a peculiar, and peculiarly American background). Both were Communists who became Trotskyists -- in Farrell's case quite a right-wing Trotskyist who supported the Vietnam War -- and both were essentially pessimists who nonetheless stayed with the left, more or less, and who wrote about Chicago's lower classes.
Both of them fell out of favor in the postwar period when the kind of realistic fiction they produced fell out of favor and critical plaudits fell more on a newer, less-political and more-psychological group of younger writers. Part of this may have to do with the generally reactionary politics of the 1950s.
Farrell was more focused on the lower-middle class, at least in his Studs Lonigan trilogy in clear, realistic prose and was remarkably frank about sex and other crudities of life in a way that was considered shockin at the time of publicaion. As a result "Studs Lonigan," the first of the trilogy and published in 1932, gained a reputation as being a dirty book. It isn't.
My grandfather, who was a friend of Farrell's when they were both at the University of Chicago in the late 1920s, read an eary draft of the first book in the trilogy and then spoke the immortal (in my family) worlds: "Dynamite stuff, Jimmy, but it will never sell." The novel has of course not been out of print in the 75 years since it was published. I recommend the Library of America three-in-one hardcover edition.
That said, I'm ambivalent about the novel. Death seems an awfully big punishment for false conciousness, and alittle moralizing in a left wing sort of way. There's also a very phone passage about a Communist-organized march in "Final Judgment" which must have been almost immediately embarrassing to Farell who left the Party after shortly afterwards upon hearing about the party purges in the mid 1930s, and who then went to visit Trotsky in Mexico.
Algren wrote about the nastier elements of the white lumpenproletariat. I wouldn't recommend reading Algren if you're already depressed. Hemmingway said of Algren's "Somebody in Boots" that ``you shoulding read it if you can't take a punch." He wasn't exaggerating. His characters have few redeeming qualities, and what sympathy they get comes from the writer's -- and the readers' -- amazement at their mere survival despite being stupid, mean and often self-destructive.
Personally, Algren was said by Studs Terkel, Kurt Vonnegut and others to be one of America's most amusing writers and he managed to carry on a long affair with Simone de Beauvoir. She would have done better in my opion to have married him rather than dumping him to go back to Sartre, who was an enormous jerk to her.
Anyway, Algren was the author of the famous bit of advice: "Never play cards with a man called Doc, never eat at a place named Mom's, and never, ever sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own."
To that end, what is the best bit of advice that you've ever received or read, famous or otherwise?