Money
Money is a kind of poetry.
-Wallace Stevens
Money, the long green,
cash, stash, rhino, jack
or just plain dough.
Chock it up, fork it over,
shell it out. Watch it
burn holes through pockets.
To be made of it! To have it
to burn! Greenbacks, double eagles,
megabucks and Ginnie Maes.
It greases the palm, feathers a nest,
holds heads above water,
makes both ends meet.
Money breeds money.
Gathering interest, compounding daily.
Always in circulation.
Money. You don't know where it's been,
but you put it where your mouth is.
And it talks.
- Dana Gioia, from The Gods of Winter
The stock market had been booming throughout the 1920s. There were stories about barbers and messenger boys who'd gotten rich off of overheard stock tips. But all the speculation was driving prices way too high, and the correction came on this day in 1929, when 3 million shares were sold in just the first half-hour. Stock prices fell so fast that by the end of the day there were shares in many companies that no one would buy at any price.
By 1932, more than 100,000 businesses had failed and about 12 million people had lost their jobs. One out of every four families had no income, and more than a million people became homeless. The situation slowly improved throughout the '30s, but the Depression didn't really end until the United States entered World War II.
The Great Depression inspired many writers. Raymond Chandler lost his job as an oil company executive after the stock market crash, and he started writing detective stories to make a living. Eudora Welty took a job with the WPA photographing farmers affected by the economy, and they inspired some of her first short stories. John Steinbeck wrote about the migrant Dust Bowl farmers in his masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath (1939). But the best-selling book of that decade was Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936), which apparently helped everyone forget their own troubles.
Ironically, it was during the Great Depression that the United States built what was then the largest building in the world, the Empire State Building, completed in 1931. And it was in 1933 that a man named Charles Darrow trademarked a board game called Monopoly, which gave people a chance to pretend that they were rich.
-Wallace Stevens
Money, the long green,
cash, stash, rhino, jack
or just plain dough.
Chock it up, fork it over,
shell it out. Watch it
burn holes through pockets.
To be made of it! To have it
to burn! Greenbacks, double eagles,
megabucks and Ginnie Maes.
It greases the palm, feathers a nest,
holds heads above water,
makes both ends meet.
Money breeds money.
Gathering interest, compounding daily.
Always in circulation.
Money. You don't know where it's been,
but you put it where your mouth is.
And it talks.
- Dana Gioia, from The Gods of Winter
The stock market had been booming throughout the 1920s. There were stories about barbers and messenger boys who'd gotten rich off of overheard stock tips. But all the speculation was driving prices way too high, and the correction came on this day in 1929, when 3 million shares were sold in just the first half-hour. Stock prices fell so fast that by the end of the day there were shares in many companies that no one would buy at any price.
By 1932, more than 100,000 businesses had failed and about 12 million people had lost their jobs. One out of every four families had no income, and more than a million people became homeless. The situation slowly improved throughout the '30s, but the Depression didn't really end until the United States entered World War II.
The Great Depression inspired many writers. Raymond Chandler lost his job as an oil company executive after the stock market crash, and he started writing detective stories to make a living. Eudora Welty took a job with the WPA photographing farmers affected by the economy, and they inspired some of her first short stories. John Steinbeck wrote about the migrant Dust Bowl farmers in his masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath (1939). But the best-selling book of that decade was Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936), which apparently helped everyone forget their own troubles.
Ironically, it was during the Great Depression that the United States built what was then the largest building in the world, the Empire State Building, completed in 1931. And it was in 1933 that a man named Charles Darrow trademarked a board game called Monopoly, which gave people a chance to pretend that they were rich.