Pity Is Not Enough — Josephine Herbst

"I'd rather fail in story writing than succeed in anything else,"         Josephine Herbst declared in 1913. The Iowa native's Trexler family trilogy,         with Pity Is Not Enough as its first volume, shows clearly that         Herbst in fact succeeded at storytelling. The book draws loosely on Herbst's         family history, using Reconstruction's demise in Georgia to link the advance         of free market capitalism to the North's abandonment of its commitment         to racial justice. The protagonists–Catherine Trexler and her brother         Joe, a carpetbagger embroiled in railroad scandals–are ripped apart         financially and psychologically by competing codes of domesticity, Southern         manners, and capitalism. In her introduction to the book, Mary Ann Rasmussen         argues that Herbst was unlike many other 1930s Leftists in that she refused         the "essentialist notions of gender difference that confounded radical         men and women of her generation." Herbst's first two novels, published         in the late 1920s, were praised by both Katherine Anne Porter and Ernest         Hemingway, but the writer gained greater fame with the proletarian fiction         and leftist journalism she wrote during the next decade. Though never         a member of the Communist Party, Herbst was ostracized as a sympathizer         and dismissed from a government job in 1942. Because she never repudiated         her radical beliefs and lifestyle, her literary reputation suffered.