The+Happiest+Man+on+Earth

Christina Lopez “The Happiest Man on Earth,” by Albert Maltz In “The Happiest Man on Earth,” by Albert Maltz, the beginning is very suspenseful for being written in 1938 during the Modernist era. It helps that Maltz is also a screen writer and the short story definitely plays out like an emotional scene. There are two main characters; Jesse and Tom. Jesse Fulton, who has been out of a job for a long time and struggling to feed his family. And Tom Brackett, a hard working businessman who worked in the oil business, who is also Jesse’s brother-in-law. “For two weeks he had been pushing himself, from Kansas City, Missouri, to Tulsa, Oklahoma, through nights of rain and a week of scorching sun, without sleep or a decent meal, sustained by the vision of that one moment.” Jesse walked two weeks just to ask Tom for a job! His luck had been running out. He had been on ‘relief’ and trying to take care of his family that way, but it wasn’t enough. His appearance really revealed his hardships. He tried to clean up at the park before coming to visit Tom, but even that didn’t work out very good; he cut himself while shaving in a drinking fountain. And his clothes were worn, tattered and had fuzz all over them. Then he stepped on a stone and it jagged a hole through his shoe and he was limping because his foot hurt so bad. So, Jesse came all this way to ask for a job as a driver for the oil company Tom worked for. And for a couple pages, the two talk back and forth about their concerns with the job. Jesse had met Egbert some weeks ago, a driver for the company, who had just died the night before. They call the trucks “dynamite trucks” but really they are filled with nitroglycerin, that is a very sensitive liquid. “This stuff goes only in special trucks! At night! They got to follow a special route! They can’t go through ant city! If they lay over, it’s got to be in a special garage! Don’t you see what that means? Don’t that tell you how dangerous it is?” Tom tells Jesse. But Jesse does not mind the danger, because his family his suffering. The average job-span of the truck driver at Tom’s company is one year- not because they quit but because they die driving the trucks! “Every year there’s one out of five drivers gets killed. That’s the average. What’s worth that?” Tom asks Jesse. But he won’t budge. His son has braces on his legs so he can’t play and the other child is skinny, skinny, skinny, just like his wife, “who ain’t pretty no more” because of the poverty. The two men have a real emotional heart to heart and Jesse is weeping and begging. Tom finally gives in and tells him to come back that night and gives him a place to stay to get cleaned up, and some money for a decent meal. Jesse is ecstatic and figures even if he lives 6 months he can save enough money for Ella, his wife, to feed the kids for a year. The story ends opened, allowing the reader to make their own ending analysis. And then Jesse said that he was “The Happiest Man on Earth” and Tom is sitting there in ‘desperate tranquility, gripping his head in his hands.” (p1689-1696) Like the Modernist tradition, Maltz uses shock to engage the reader but also emotions between two men which proves to be very, heart wrenching. Like our book states “it was also concerned with reevaluating the social and artistic consciousness of the age.” It was written post-depression so finding jobs and providing for the family were big issues.