As the Depression worsened in the 1930s, journalists went looking for stories in the hinterlands. They sought “a man with a hoe, a country rube who penned verse, a Shakespeare in overalls,” as Mike Gold sardonically put it. Conroy insisted that these journalists needed to look no further: The man with the hoe, the country rube who penned verse, the Shakespeare in overalls—all these and many more wrote for The Anvil.
Within three years, The Anvil reached a circulation of 5,000—or 3,000 more than the Partisan Review. Richard Wright picked up The Anvil in the University of Chicago library and soon published poems in the magazine, including “Strength” and “Child of the Dead and Forgotten Gods.” Conroy published the early writings of Nelson Algren, Meridel Le Sueur, and Yiddish poet Moishe Nadir alongside towering left-literary figures like Maxim Gorky and Langston Hughes. Leon McCauley, who taught himself to write in prison, was one of several Wobblies contributing to The Anvil, and the magazine began to develop its own politics. With its IWW and anarchist streak, The Anvil deviated from the New York–based Communist Party and Soviet orthodoxy.
In 1935, with Conroy busy on a second novel and the economics of publishing shifting, The Anvil fell on hard financial times while retaining a valuable mailing list. The magazine was officially brought to New York via a merger and came with a new title: Partisan Review and Anvil. That entity subsequently split from the Communist Party’s distribution support in 1937 and the Partisan Review relaunched. In the process, The Anvil’s name died.
Conroy set out to be a writer as well as an editor. He began his first novel, The Disinherited, in the late 1920s, and when it was published in 1933, it became the standard-bearer for the proletarian novel: a bildungsroman about a boy named Larry Donovan growing up in a coal-mining camp, seeking factory work in St. Louis and then Detroit, joining the itinerant, unemployed masses, and laboring on a road crew—anything to survive the Great Depression’s hard winters.
Yet make no mistake: Conroy was not interested in gloomy tales of a dehumanized subproletariat. Humor, as well as a reverence for nature and naturalism, Midwestern myth, and expressions of worker dignity, all combine to give Conroy’s stories a life-affirming quality similar to traditional forms of folk art. In the end, human resourcefulness and endurance prevail, and there’s nothing better than a joke about the boss.