Pity Is Not Enough

"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.