What would be the American equivalent of "Dickensian"?

Solution 1:

I don't think that there is an American author equivalent to Dickens (Dickensian) whose name would suggest images of poverty, social inequalities etc. when we refer to "The Great Depression" period and its tragic consequences.

As the following extract shows, of the authors that wrote about that period of the American History, none became so famous and popular to become an eponym in the Dickensian sense:

• When the stock market crashed in October 1929 and the hectic prosperity of the 1920s gave way to mass unemployment, the crisis energized American writers. After a decade in which the literary experiments of the Modernists -- Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot -- dominated the scene, a new wave of writers began to look to politics and economics for inspiration.

• What did the storytellers of the Depression know that our own writers don’t? And what can we learn from the writers of the 1930s about poverty and politics, literature and society? In this series, I will look at four Depression classics -- John Dos Passos’s “The Big Money,” Edmund Wilson’s “The American Jitters,” James Agees “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” and John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” -- reading them to see whether and how these books still speak to us today.

(www.bloomberg.com)

The Great Depression itself is commonly cited to refer to conditions of extreme poverty, unemployment, social distress etc.:

• In 2008, the U.S. suffered the most severe economic crisis since 1929. This was followed by a deep recession characterized by high unemployment, financial instability and government deadlock -- an echo of the problems that plagued the country during the Depression, though in much less virulent form.

Also, note that the adjective Dickensian, is commonly used also in AmE.

Solution 2:

Your best bet is to just use dickensian. While the effort to find a local reference is appreciated (really, I wish more people would undertake such an effort), Dickens is an author who is commonly read in the united States. In middle-high school, we tend to read Great Expectations or A Tale of Two Cities (and maybe Oliver Twist), but A Christmas Carol is a perennial favorite.

And, even if we haven't read his works, we often know him by reputation or just by having seen the word dickensian enough in context (c.f. quixotic mission, kafkaesque experience, orwellian reality, faustian deal) to get the gist.

A few examples from major newspapers (it's hard to search for dickensian without pulling up tons of articles/books about Dickens himself, so I limited my searches to include newspaper names):

• Turkey’s Dickensian Disaster (New York Times)
• No Happy Ending in Dickensian Baltimore (NYT)

• Dickensian poverty in 2013 (Washington Times)

  Most Americans, as we go about our daily lives, do not see these food lines because they’re working. People who need food are lining up every day in cities and towns across the country, a grim, Dickensian testament to the growing poverty that is all around us.

• A Nightmare Court, Worthy of Dickens (NYT)

  Over the next few years, Mr. Carridice, now 38, appeared 20 times in Bronx Criminal Court. [...]. In June 2015, more than a thousand days after his arrest, Mr. Carridice’s case finally went to trial. He was acquitted on all counts.
  This Dickensian nightmare is all too common in the Bronx, according to a class-action lawsuit filed Tuesday in Federal District Court by the Bronx Defenders, which represents indigent clients, and by two private law firms.

(although I don't really agree with its use in that last one).

• Ditching Dickensian [used 36 times in the article](The Paris Review)

  Dickensian and its variations have been with us since at least 1856, when the OED identified the Saturday Review as referring to a “Dickensian description of an execution.” Variants of the term blossomed throughout the nineteenth century: Dickenesque, Dickensy, Dickensish, Dickeny. And their uses, unsurprisingly, run the gamut. Sometimes they indicate a certain comic sensibility; sometimes they refer to sordid working conditions, or to grotesque characterizations, or to acuity of social observation.

(I'll clean up the links and give commentary when I get to a computer, hard to C&P clips from mobile)