Ain't Got No Home, which takes its title from a 1938 song by folk musician Woody Guthrie, is the latest brush stroke in the still-evolving portrait of the legacy of Old Left cultural workers. As each cohort of young scholars dips into a palette of innovative perspectives to scrutinize Depression-era ancestors, so the activist literature, art, song, ethnography, and historical research of the decades just prior to the Cold War are revealed to be ever more multihued and intricate. You may have thought that you had had your fill of John Steinbeck's “Okies” and books about blacks fleeing to the “promised land,” but this time the layout is different. In contrast to the prevalent depictions of 1930s–1940s mass migrations of African Americans and southern whites “as separate streams feeding different political and aesthetic pools” (13), Battat's focus is on assorted media responses to the journeys as mutually interconnected and aimed at fomenting a radical political alliance.

The authors and artists featured by Battat include some familiar names – Steinbeck, Dorothea Lange, Chester Himes, Ann Petry, Tillie Olsen – but she catches most of them at unexpected angles to cause the familiar to look inspiringly strange. This is achieved partly through couplings with the lesser-known – William Attaway, Sanora Babb, Elisabeth Catlett, Jack Conroy – in an approach that repeatedly testifies to the power of the migration story as a vehicle affording a combined account of US populism and civil rights. Her chapters vary in the number of texts of literary and visual culture that are showcased as she joins together not only creative works with each other but also political ideas that are sometimes thought to be independent if not vigorously unalike.

In 230 pages, Battat moves among her sequence of pairings with the ease of a competitive skateboarder. The 1933 Scottsboro case (when nine black youths on a freight train were falsely accused of rape) led to the revising of the “hobo narrative” tradition into tales of interracial communities at the hands of Steinbeck (Of Mice and Men, 1937) and Attaway (Let Me Breathe Thunder, 1939). Babb's Whose Names Are Unknown (drafted in the late 1930s, published 2004) is discussed as a multiethnic and gender-conscious dust bowl novel in contrast to Steinbeck's raceless and masculinist The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Attaway's Blood on the Forge (1941) is then juxtaposed to Babb's work in its use of the “blues form” to express skepticism about the priority of civil rights in the industrial-union movement. The iconic fame of Lange's “Migrant Mother” photograph (1936) is described as casting a “long shadow” (96) that has concealed the racially diverse drawings of Catlett and the critical feminist fiction of Olsen. Chester Himes concludes the survey with If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) reclaimed as the expression of black left internationalism.

Some of this is not entirely new, but Battat peels off in thought-provoking directions and produces the kind of criticism that propels one back to the original writings and images for another look. She is impressive in the close-reading skills she brings to interdisciplinary texts and in her explanation of the historical pressures that helped shape the cultural projects under discussion. On occasion she does seem to overplay her hand by giving the impression of ascribing strategic and tactical moves to every aspect of an artist's effort, downplaying the idiosyncrasies of biography and psychology that are revealed in several of her portraits of authors. This bypassing of some of the mysteries of the creative process is suggested by summary remarks such as, “writers and artists on the interracial Left turned to the themes and forms of the migration narrative to advance a broad-based struggle for democracy” (163).

An admirable methodological theme of this volume is that a scholar should not flee from apparent contradictions in political and regional histories, but embrace dialectics and dualism to overcome and assimilate earlier assessments. Yet the phenomena of populism, the Popular Front, the “Black Popular Front,” civil rights, and even Communism/communism are tricky for all of us; over time they acquired generic meanings considerably looser than their original and technical ones. The Popular Front, in particular, had an amorphous nature rendering it a subject for easy mythologizing, and Battat's explanation of the Communism/populism/antiracism trifecta never really comes together in a satisfying manner. Nonetheless, she has ushered much that is new into the critical conversation, intelligently sifting through massive amounts of cultural and political history for the telling, often forgotten detail allowing access to areas of cultural practice that would be otherwise lost to history. The result is an unrelentingly provocative book, eminently readable in its investigation of the particulars of literary, artistic, and intellectual narratives that dispute the mythologies of geographical treks.