Desperate Times: Stories from the Great Depression
Introduction to a collection of short fiction by Cornell Woolrich
Published by Renaissance Literary & Talent/Villa Romana Books,
February 2025
The widespread suffering of millions during the Great Depression has forever embedded itself into our cultural memory. Photographs and descriptions of unending breadlines, shantytowns built by the homeless, and impoverished farmers migrating in the hopes of finding work remind us of the desolate time in American history when over 25% of the population was unemployed. Following the stock market crash of 1929, the misery dragged on for an entire decade as the economy floundered, forcing countless people and families into desperate situations.
It was inevitable that the profound effects of the Depression made their way into the literary works of the time. A preeminent example of Depression-era literature is John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, which depicts the Joads, a family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by the Dust Bowl and economic hardship toward the hope of a better life in California. Depictions likes this were not limited to realist fiction. After losing his job at an oil company, Raymond Chandler turned unemployment into opportunity and started writing detective fiction. Inspired by the likes of Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, Chandler explored the corruption and desperation of Depression-wracked Los Angeles through his character Detective Philip Marlowe in novels like The Big Sleep.
But it was famed suspense writer Cornell Woolrich whose life and work was altered in the most fascinating of ways during the Depression. A prolific storyteller, he is regarded as the Poe of the 20th century, one of the best noir and suspense writers of his time. Much of his most renowned work, like the novel The Bride Wore Black and short story “It Had to Be Murder,” the basis for Hitchcock’s Rear Window, was produced in the 1940s and very much informed by the years of the Depression.
Woolrich had been writing well before the stock market crashed, penning Jazz Age novels and short stories throughout the late 1920s in the vein of his literary idol F. Scott Fitzgerald. His first novel, Cover Charge, was published in 1926 when Woolrich was just 22 years old. Focused on romance and the party-going antics of that era, Woolrich’s work during these years never made a significant splash. As the Depression raged on in the early 1930s, his career prospects in the genre grew even more dismal. The market had changed drastically and readers were no longer interested in the gilded tales of socialites. He would have to make drastic changes of his own to stay afloat.
His second novel, Children of the Ritz, won a contest put on by College Humor and Hollywood studio First National Pictures, giving him the chance to move to Los Angeles in 1928 to write the film adaptation. Woolrich’s biographer, Francis M. Nevins Jr., writes in Cornell Woolrich: First You Dream, Then You Die (The Mysterious Press, 1988) that his exposure to the film world “helped develop his already evident talent for writing visually.” What he learned in Hollywood about narrative drive and pacing undoubtedly elevated his later suspense writing. The stories Woolrich produced in those years were few and far between, but he wrote three more Jazz Age novels, two of which, Times Square and A Young Man’s Heart, while not hugely successful, point to evolutions in his writing that would culminate in his imminent shift to suspense fiction.
Woolrich’s time alone in Los Angeles was also one of personal upheaval. Although he was a closeted homosexual, something that haunted him his entire adult life and certainly seeped into his writing, he married Gloria Blackton, daughter of filmmaker and Hollywood tycoon J. Stuart Blackton. The marriage was predictably disastrous, ending in no small part thanks to a diary of his Gloria found that detailed his sexual exploits with men around town. This along with dwindling prospects in Hollywood sent Woolrich fleeing back to New York to live with his mother. Perhaps just as complicated as his relationship with his own sexuality was his relationship with his mother, Claire Attalie Woolrich, née Tarler. She was a commanding force in his life and they were, for all intents and purposes, co-dependent. His college friends and colleagues recounted over the years that he was dominated by her, and sometimes she even forbade him to leave the hotel apartment they would later share.
After Woolrich’s return to New York in 1931, he and his mother set sail for a months-long repose in Europe funded by the Tarler family estate. While there, he finished his sixth novel, Manhattan Love Song, published in 1932. Although it is primarily a romance set in the Jazz Age, Nevins reports that “by today’s standards it’s a crime novel.” Centered on “a man’s enslavement to a woman” like Woolrich’s earlier novels, Manhattan Love Song is steeped in the milieu of professional criminals. To Nevins this novel marked not only a progression in his writing but a breakthrough to his more mature work. It’s the first of his novels narrated in first-person, and by trapping the reader inside the head of the protagonist, he “makes us not only empathize with the character’s torment but also shudder at his twisted soul,” a strategy Woolrich would employ in his best suspense fiction.
There weren’t many who could afford a comfortable European escape in the early 1930s, so upon their return to New York in 1932, Woolrich moved into a cheap hotel determined to survive on his own without his mother’s help. The year that followed was exceedingly difficult for him. Woolrich details his experience trying to make ends meet in “Even God Felt the Depression,” an autobiographical story which closes this collection. It went unpublished until long after his death when, in 1991, it appeared for the first time alongside other autobiographical stories in Blues of a Lifetime. “I'd hardly made a cent that whole year. Or for that matter the one before, or the one before that,” he tells us, lamenting that it was “no time in which to be a writer.” To keep from starving, he resorted to selling personal items, such as a gold watch passed down to him from the Tarler family and several limited edition books.
Still trying to write romances and gilded-era social commentary, he only managed to get two stories published in 1932 and none in 1933. He attempted another novel called I Love You, Paris, but it was rejected by publishers for being too focused on a bygone era of Paris no one in Depression-era New York was interested in. No Hollywood producers would touch it either, dashing any hopes of a film deal. Woolrich threw the manuscript in the trash and so ended his youth, as he saw it. He scraped by only because his mother began paying his bills behind his back. Desperate for cash, he was forced to return to her clutches once more. That year the two of them moved into the Hotel Marseilles which would be his home, “or more precisely his prison cell,” Nevins reports, for the next twenty-five years.
In addition to financial woes, Woolrich was also suffering from “nervous tension and a psychological block” around this time, spurred partly by Gloria’s arrival in New York to officially annul their marriage on the grounds that it was never consummated. “The imminent exposure of his homosexuality must have kept him as keyed up and quivering with terror as the most hard-pressed characters in his later suspense fiction,” Nevins writes. Gloria revealed none of his secrets but Woolrich’s block continued into the early months of 1934 when he published just a few romantic tales that were most likely written in previous years. He was at a turning point. The fiction he was so used to writing was not getting him anywhere. He’d tried to make it on his own but ended up back with the person he vowed not to accept support from. He was desperate. It was time to make a change.
In May 1934, Woolrich’s noir world was born with the publication of “Death Sits in the Dentist’s Chair,” his first mystery tale. It was published in the pulp magazine Detective Fiction Weekly, one of many such magazines in which his work would continue to appear. Other mysteries like “Walls That Hear You” and “Preview of Death” came out later that year, cementing his reputation in the genre. The floodgates were open. Woolrich had translated the tight storyline and emotional intensity he achieved in Manhattan Love Song into settings and scenarios more appropriate for audiences of the 1930s. He had finally hit his stride, as he confirms in Blues of a Lifetime: “I finally learned to do my job competently.”
Even in his first suspense stories of 1934, Woolrich eloquently tapped into the darkness at the heart of life during the decade. “Death Sits in the Dentist’s Chair” was drenched in Depression-era desperation, featuring the “terrible resignation of the very poor,” as Woolrich puts it in his opening lines. He wrote of characters pushed to desperate ends by circumstances of poverty, corruption and the cruel hand of fate. A cynicism about life permeated his writing, likely born, as Nevins suggests, from his internal turmoil over his sexuality. Regardless of his personal life and financial situation, or perhaps because of them, Woolrich captured something poignant of the human condition that resonated deeply with readers. Nevins phrases it perfectly when he writes that Woolrich:
…knew the desperation of the American people, and gave voice to their cries of pain as powerfully as any of the mainstream proletarian writers of the time. When it comes to putting us in the skin of a frightened little guy in a miserable little apartment with a hungry wife and children and no money and no job and fear of tomorrow eating him like a cancer, Woolrich has no peers.
The collection you have in your hands highlights some of Woolrich’s best short fiction in this vein. Published in the 1930s or early 1940s, each story (with the exception of the autobiographical “Even God Felt the Depression,” written near the end of Woolrich’s life in the 1960s) is set in the bitter days of the Depression. The desperation he infuses into his destitute characters provides a motive for extreme acts such as theft, self-sacrifice, brutality, or even… murder. These set-ups allow Woolrich to showcase some of his finest suspense writing. He employs breathless pacing, life-or-death stakes, and an almost claustrophobic proximity to his characters’ tortured states of mind to explore the anguish and agony these desperate times evoked.
“Dormant Account,” the most recent fictional story included herein, was published in 1942, around the same time as his novels Phantom Lady and Black Alibi. By this point, Woolrich had made his mark in hardcover with The Bride Wore Black, published in 1940, his first noir suspense novel. A haunting depiction of the revenge spree of a woman whose husband was killed on their wedding day, it is the novel Woolrich is most known for today. Over the course of the 1940s, he would write some of his most celebrated fiction. Several of his stories and novels were adapted into films and television episodes by major Hollywood studios, the most famous being Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 thriller film Rear Window, adapted from the story “It Had to Be Murder,” also published in 1942.
It is a treat, therefore, to read some of Woolrich’s best stories from 1934 to 1942, before he hit his peak. Desperate Times: Stories from the Great Depression gives readers the chance to get to know Woolrich’s suspense fiction in its formative years, as it developed and evolved in the shadow of the worst economic decade in America’s history. Woolrich’s work was just as informed by the tormented contours of his personal life – his latent homosexuality, a difficult relationship with his mother, and resulting alcoholism – as it was by the financial hardship of the era. The pages that follow illustrate how adept Woolrich was, even in the early days of his suspense writing, at using both his inner demons and the unfair, corrupt state of the world to capture the darkness and desperation inherent in being human.
