The economy is weak and people don’t have a lot of money. There are a lot of writers around, but they are finding a hostile market where it is hard to get paid a decent wage. Some of them have started writing in a more experimental if hard way in part to get noticed. Eventually, a new technology will create new markets for their work and a “Golden Age” of writing in a new style will be born.
Sound unlikely? It happened once before, in the Great Depression. The new technology was the paperback, and the writers that came out of this difficult time include Faulkner, Buck, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck.