The 1930s Arts and Entertainment: Headline Makers

Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975) The best known of the regionalist painters, Thomas Hart Benton began his career as a writer and illustrator for a newspaper in Joplin, Missouri. He attended the Chicago Art Institute and went to art school in Paris. Unimpressed with abstract art, in 1918 Benton began to develop a style he called "Americanism." Benton traveled widely in the United States, meeting and painting pictures of hardworking, straightforward, ordinary people. Benton's many paintings and public art works include a mural for the Missouri state capitol, completed in 1935.

Al Capp (1909–1979) Creator of the comic strip Li'l Abner, Al Capp was born Alfred Gerald Caplin in New Haven, Connecticut. His upbringing left him well qualified to draw and write about the hillbilly life of Li'l Abner. As the best-known comic strip artist of his generation, Capp enjoyed a celebrity lifestyle. But he kept on writing and drawing the strip for forty-four years. Capp's conservatism went out of fashion in the 1960s. After the comic strip was dropped by several papers in the 1970s, Capp retired Li'l Abner himself.

Joan Crawford (1904–1977) Probably the most adaptable actress of the 1930s, Joan Crawford was a major star of Depression-era Hollywood. She starred in romantic comedies such as Forsaking All Others (1934), gangster movies such as Dance Fools Dance (1931), Depression melodramas like Possessed (1931), and even an ice-skating revue, Ice Follies of 1939 (1939). Crawford had a tough start, working in a laundry and as a waitress before being spotted working as a chorus girl in Detroit. Her career gradually declined in the late 1930s and she was eventually dropped by M-G-M in 1944.

William Faulkner (1897–1962) One of the greatest American writers of all time, William Faulkner set most of his novels and short stories in the imaginary Yoknapatawpha County of Mississippi. He used the lives of a handful of fictional families to explore the history and society of the Deep South. The novels The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Absalom! Absalom! (1936) are among the finest novels of the twentieth century. Starting in the 1930s, Faulkner also wrote or co-wrote many screenplays, most notably for director Howard Hawks.

Ella Fitzgerald (1918–1996) Ella Fitzgerald's professional singing career began in 1935. She became one of the most successful vocalists of the twentieth century. In the 1930s Fitzgerald performed and recorded with the Chick Webb big band, but she also composed and arranged her own music. Her "A-Tisket, A-Tasket" was a huge hit in 1938. When Webb died in 1939, Fitzgerald became one of the youngest bandleaders in the country. In the 1950s, her Songbooks revived her career and made jazz popular again. As the unofficial "first lady" of jazz, she was still performing thirty-six weeks a year in the 1980s.

Woody Guthrie (1912–1967) Woody Guthrie, born Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, hitched rides, walked, and rode the rails around America during the 1930s. He wrote more than one thousand songs about his experiences, glorifying outlaws, outcasts, and the poor. Guthrie was also a political activist, writing for the communist newspaper People's World in the late 1930s. He became a big star in the 1940s but backed out of a contract with CBS radio because he feared "selling out." Guthrie's influence on American folk music can be heard in the songs of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and his son, Arlo Guthrie.