"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 protagonistsCatherine Trexler and her brother
Joe, a carpetbagger embroiled in railroad scandalsare 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.