Pity Is Not Enough

About the Book

The epic novel of America from Reconstruction to the brink of World War I

"I'd rather fail in story writing than succeed in anything else," Josephine Herbst said in 1913. The ongoing interest in Pity Is Not Enough shows that Herbst in fact succeeded at storytelling.

Drawing loosely on her family history, Herbst uses 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.

Mary Ann Rasmussen's introduction reveals that Herbst departed from other 1930s leftists in refusing 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, and she never repudiated her radical beliefs and lifestyle.