By the nineteen thirties the slow enrichment of New Zealand literature by New Zealanders had reached an advanced stage. The events of the slump years in the early part of the decade provided the moral shock which awakened many writers to a consciousness of the country and time they lived in. John Mulgan'sMan Alone (1939), a realistic novel but tinged with the romanticism of the left, linked the New Zealand of the slump years with the English intellectuals who saw in the Spanish War an event emotionally more evocative than the greater war which followed hard upon it. The slump years also matured the art of Frank Sargeson, who in his short stories created a local idiom which has a rugged authenticity far stronger and more wholesome than anything written by his predecessors. Although Sargeson entertained what has been described as a “slump fixation” and also was coloured by the clichés of thought of the left, his work has force and originality; he reached full maturity in the stories collected in A Man and His Wife (1940). This was the voice of New Zealand. His later work, the novels That Summer, also slump dominated, I Saw in My Dream, and I, For One … have added to his stature, especially the latter in which he sets aside all his earlier habits of thought.

One sincere and graceful novel of the thirties, the still underestimated Show Down (1934) by M. Escott, stands aside from its contemporaries, forming no part of any “movement”.

If prose was still the field for the strong who could, like Sargeson, engage themselves in the huge task of creating a new idiom, a school of poetry developed which leapt effortlessly into existence fully armed, clear eyed, and defiant of all but the same preoccupations of radical thought which the slump had engendered in prose. It quickly displaced the fumbling “Georgian” poets of the first three decades. R. A. K. Mason, who had conquered a certain public even as far afield as England in the twenties, has his best work flavoured with the astringent taste of “social consciousness”. A. R. D. Fairburn, an intellectual who spent his talents in pursuing a wide variety of objectives, was at his best in verse, where his ruthless wit jostled a subdued lyric gift. Denis Glover, too, began his long career in satire with a pungency nearer to the loved grossness of the common man. Allen Curnow explored his own talents, with a taste for experiment and the ability to make a high art of poetry which to others was too often a ragbag for involuntary emotion. These four men in Auckland and Christchurch set up their gonfalons and led forth their cohorts of words with a gaiety and an authority founded on youth and a fresh, insouciant view of their country.

The young men had indeed been anticipated by the old women (if the survivor will pardon the ungallant word), Ursula Bethell and Eileen Duggan. Both were sustained by strong religious feeling. Both practised the art of poetry with dedicated singleness of purpose.

One poet of the thirties was of strange achievement. Walter D'Arcy Cresswell, mediocre as a poet, stated overwhelmingly in two works of autobiography the justification for leading the life of a poet. The Poet's Progress (1930), mannered eighteenth century pastiche, and Present Without Leave (1939) show the same magnificent contempt for common prudence that Thomas Arnold had attributed to the heroic age of early colonisation.

The New Zealand Government's 1940 centennial series produced some good books – E. H. McCormick'sStudy of New Zealand Writers and Artists, Oliver Duff'sNew Zealand Now, Helen M. Simpson's The Women of New Zealand, and J. C. Beaglehole'sDiscovery of New Zealand. One of its associated competitions gave a prize to the first of M. H. Holcroft's original studies of the interaction of the New Zealand environment and the arts, afterwards collected in Discovered Isles.

The Second World War caused less intellectual upheaval than the slump. It did produce some good narratives of escape of which W. B. Thomas' Dare to be Free and James Hargest's Farewell Campo 12 were the most considerable. The best war novel was Guthrie Wilson's first book, Brave Company. R. M. Burdon's biographies, especially the New Zealand Notables series and King Dick, rugged, iconoclastic and well-proportioned, opened new territory.