MCKENNEY, RUTH 1911-1972

Writer

Significance

Ruth McKenney is one of the best examples of the ways in which 1930s writers combined radical politics, an appreciation of their audience's need for entertainment, and a desire to document the harsh realities of Depression life. Moving between writing scripts for radio, stage, and screen; light short stories in The New Yorker; essays for the Communist weekly New Masses; and journalism for the World-Telegram in New York, McKenney seems to embody a certain cultural ethos of the period.

Autobiography

Ruth McKenney is best known today as the author of My Sister Eileen, the best-selling account of her family life during her childhood. This 1938 autobiography was a collection of McKenney's New Yorker pieces; a second collection appeared two years later under the title The McKenneys Carry On. Both volumes were critically acclaimed: My Sister Eileen went through more than a dozen printings and became first a Broadway play then a 1942 Hollywood film directed by Alexander Hall and starring Rosalind Russell and Brian Aherne. In 1955 Richard Quine directed a musical version with Betty Garrett, Janet Leigh, and Jack Lemmon; the Broadway version was titled Wonderful Town. The book's chapter headings give a fair idea of its general flavor: Hun-gah is subheaded "Eileen learns to play the piano and I take elocution lessons"; while A Loud Sneer for Our Feathered Friends is further explained as "We go to a girls' camp and don't think much of it, also about birds"; and The Gladsome Washing Machine Season is subheaded "Father feels like King Lear, with good reason."

Covering the Bases

This text would hardly identify McKenney as a radical writer of the time, but McKenney wrote other books: in 1939 and 1940 her works included a campaign pamphlet for the Communist Party presidential and vice presidential candidates titled Browder and Ford for Peace, Jobs and Socialism and Industrial Valley, a documentary account of the successful 1932-1936 rubber strike in Akron, Ohio. Thus, McKenney moved from popular autobiography to documentary labor history to radical pamphleteering. One week she might find herself in Hollywood working on the script of My Sister Eileen; the next filing her regular theater review column in New Masses, of which she became an editor (1938-1944). In fact, she moved in high Communist circles, spending her vacations with Communist leader Earl Browder and his family. Moreover, sister Eileen was married to modernist novelist Nathanael West, author of The Day of the Locust.

Proletarian Documentary

McKenney's early experience as a reporter on the New York Post served her well in her work on Industrial Valley. Using only two fictitious names in her collective biography of the strikers, McKenney traces the strike's progress using excerpts from newspaper headlines, vital statistics, and editorial comments on national and local affairs. Industrial Valley not only exemplifies radical documentary of the period but serves perhaps as its avatar.

Reception

Industrial Valley was well received both by radical and mainstream critics and acclaimed by radical literary critic Malcolm Cowley, writing in the New Republic, as perhaps the best American example of proletarian literature. The carefully researched Industrial Valley stands not just as exemplar for its genre, but as explanation for the genre's importance. Unlike Nathan Asch, James Rorty, Sherwood Anderson, and others who documented their journeys through America, McKenney keeps herself entirely out of the story. Thus, she avoids the naked methodology of those works, the discussions of how best to represent American culture, to tell the American story. What McKenney does, instead, is to contrast the official truths of Akron, Ohio, as expressed by newspapers and Chamber of Commerce releases, with the unofficial, yet very real, suffering of the population there, as documented by the numbers of people applying for relief, the numbers freezing to death, the number of suicides. Through these often surreal juxtapositions, McKenney forces readers to consider the distance between these two accounts.

Later Career

After the 1930s McKenney continued writing light autobiography, fiction, and travel books. The Loud Red Patrick, her 1947 book about her grandfather, was also made into a Broadway show. Her film scripts, cowritten with husband Richard Branstein, included both versions of My Sister Eileen (1942, 1955), San Diego, I Love You (1944), The Trouble With Women (1947), and Song of Surrender (1949). She died in 1972 at age sixty.

Sources:

Malcolm Cowley, Review in New Republic, 98 (22 February 1939): 77;

M. L. Elting, Review in Commonweal, 28 (15 July 1938): 332;

Ruth McKenney, Industrial Valley (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939);

McKenney, The McKenneys Carry On (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940);

McKenney, My Sister Eileen (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938);

Obituary for Ruth McKenney, Variety (2 August 1972);

Review [unsigned], Books (24 July 1938): 2.

McKenney, Ruth (1911–72),author of My Sister Eileen (1938), humorous sketches about the youth of her sister, later married to Nathanael West. This work was dramatized (1941) and made into the musical comedy Wonderful Town (1953). Other works on her family include The McKenneys Carry On (1940) and The Loud Red Patrick (1947). Industrial Valley (1939) is nonfiction about labor strife in Akron, and Jake Home (1943), a novel sympathetically treating a Communist labor organizer, deals with the Sacco‐Vanzetti case.