With this book, Alan Wald launches a bold and passionate account of the U.S. Literary Left from the 1920s through the 1960s. Exiles from a Future Time , the first volume of a trilogy, focuses on the ...forging of a Communist-led literary tradition in the 1930s. Exploring writers' intimate lives and heartfelt political commitments, Wald draws on original research in scores of archives and personal collections of papers; correspondence and interviews with hundreds of writers and their friends and families; and a treasure trove of unpublished memoirs, fiction, and poetry. In fashioning a humanscape of the Literary Left, Wald not only reassesses acclaimed authors but also returns to memory dozens of forgotten, talented writers. The authors range from the familiar Mike Gold, Langston Hughes, and Muriel Rukeyser to William Attaway, John Malcolm Brinnin, Stanley Burnshaw, Joy Davidman, Sol Funaroff, Joseph Freeman, Alfred Hayes, Eugene Clay Holmes, V. J. Jerome, Ruth Lechlitner, and Frances Winwar. Focusing on the formation of the tradition and the organization of the Cultural Left, Wald investigates the elective affinity of its avant-garde poets, the Afro-cosmopolitanism of its Black radical literary movement, and the uneasy negotiation between feminist concerns and class identity among its women writers.
For a generation, Alan M. Wald'sThe New York Intellectualshas stood as the authoritative account of an often misunderstood chapter in the history of a celebrated tradition among literary radicals in ...the United States. His passionate investigation of over half a century of dissident Marxist thought, Jewish internationalism, fervent political activism, and the complex art of the literary imagination is enriched by more than one hundred personal interviews, unparalleled primary research, and critical interpretations of novels and short stories depicting the inner lives of committed writers and thinkers. Wald's commanding biographical portraits of rebel outsiders who mostly became insiders retains its resonance today and includes commentary on Max Eastman, Elliot Cohen, Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook, Tess Slesinger, Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, Irving Kristol, Irving Howe, Hannah Arendt, and more. With a new preface by the author that tracks the rebounding influence of these intellectuals in the era of Occupy and Bernie Sanders, this anniversary edition shows that the trajectory and ideological ordeals of the New York intellectual Left still matters today.
For a generation, Alan M. Wald's The New York Intellectuals has stood as the authoritative account of an often misunderstood chapter in the history of a celebrated tradition among literary radicals ...in the United States. With a new introduction by the author, this anniversary edition shows that the trajectory and ideological ordeals of the New York intellectual Left still matters today.
American Night, the final volume of an unprecedented trilogy, brings Alan Wald's multigenerational history of Communist writers to a poignant climax. Using new research to explore the intimate lives ...of novelists, poets, and critics during the Cold War, Wald reveals a radical community longing for the rebirth of the social vision of the 1930s and struggling with a loss of moral certainty as the Communist worldview was being called into question. The resulting literature, Wald shows, is a haunting record of fracture and struggle linked by common structures of feeling, ones more suggestive of the "negative dialectics" of Theodor Adorno than the traditional social realism of the Left.Establishing new points of contact among Kenneth Fearing, Ann Petry, Alexander Saxton, Richard Wright, Jo Sinclair, Thomas McGrath, and Carlos Bulosan, Wald argues that these writers were in dialogue with psychoanalysis, existentialism, and postwar modernism, often generating moods of piercing emotional acuity and cosmic dissent. He also recounts the contributions of lesser known cultural workers, with a unique accent on gays and lesbians, secular Jews, and people of color. The vexing ambiguities of an era Wald labels "late antifascism" serve to frame an impressive collective biography.
From the instant that the US journalist John Reed witnessed the "Ten Days that Shook the World" in the fall of 1917, ideas and images of the Russian Revolution began to resonate across the world. The ...event had an electrifying nearreligious import for all varieties of radicals as a beacon of justice signaling that hierarchies were to be leveled on behalf of a liberated, unified humanity. What had been done and was being said in Red Russia were embraced and interpreted by activists and cultural workers as the opening of a new horizon; soon Bolshevik politics and the avant-garde art of the revolution commenced to intertwine with the national experiences and local struggles of many societies. One hundred years later, people are still wrestling with the ways in which the event of the Bolshevik Revolution launched Communist-led political and cultural movements that generated myriad progeny. This post-revolution tradition is at this point a long-term, hybrid legacy, conditioned by organized, material underpinnings and what started as a relatively homogeneous ideological universe; the methods of observation and inference required to engage such a slow process evoke the need for an analytical category close to that of a longue durée.
The second of three volumes by Alan Wald that track the political and personal lives of several generations of U.S. left-wing writers,Trinity of Passioncarries forward the chronicle launched inExiles ...from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. In this volume Wald delves into literary, emotional, and ideological trajectories of radical cultural workers in the era when the International Brigades fought in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and the United States battled in World War II (1941-45). Probing in rich and haunting detail the controversial impact of the Popular Front on literary culture, he explores the ethical and aesthetic challenges that pro-Communist writers faced.Wald presents a cross section of literary talent, from the famous to the forgotten, the major to the minor. The writers examined include Len Zinberg (a.k.a. Ed Lacy), John Oliver Killens, Irwin Shaw, Albert Maltz, Ann Petry, Chester Himes, Henry Roth, Lauren Gilfillan, Ruth McKenney, Morris U. Schappes, and Jo Sinclair. He also uncovers dramatic new information about Arthur Miller's complex commitment to the Left.Confronting heartfelt questions about Jewish masculinity, racism at the core of liberal democracy, the corrosion of utopian dreams, and the thorny interaction between antifascism and Communism, Wald re-creates the intellectual and cultural landscape of a remarkable era.
Aaron Kramer was the most prolific poet to emerge from the U. S. Communist movement in the mid-20th century, his earliest collections issued by International Publishers. In his last decades, he was ...chiefly known as a skilled and reliable contributor of verse, essays, and translations from the Yiddish to progressive Jewish magazines such as Jewish Currents and Outlook. Yet all efforts to revive his reputation through conventional means, including the publication of a major collection and appreciation in 2004, have been singularly unsuccessful. What might be gained through a deeper contextualization of his work, an attempt to inhabit his life as it played out in the changing contexts and fortunes of the left? Kramer was a minor poet, but there is still much to be valued by assessing him as the widower of a lost Communist faith who never truly remarried, an artist haunted by dreams murdered by Hitler and Stalin.
An outstanding set of informative essays, providing an unsurpassed account of the dynamic revolutionary socialist current known as American Trotskyism.
Cold War Modernity Wald, Alan M
Modernism/Modernity,
11/2014, Volume:
21, Issue:
4
Journal Article, Book Review
Peer reviewed
Reading die essays through die prism of a sequence of conceptual categories is just too restrictive to illuminate die dynamic complexity of die way scholarship evolves in cultural studies; for ...example, there was always die presence of a global/international perspective since die establishment of die field. ...die subtitle, A Critical Assessment, doesn't always help clarify inasmuch as some of die essays simply go their own way.\n And then along comes a climactic episode-the entrance of "the white pervert," Hemy Valkill-which seemingly reinscribes die most conventional fears about "queer" behavior and race! Schmidt's multiple perspectives permit a steady stream of enriching insights as he reminds us that the location of this same-sex pedophilic threat comes from die employer of a black domestic (in this instance a male), as opposed to "the strange man in die park," and that die perversion is associated with an ostensible racial liberalism practiced by a moneyed elite. ...die naiveté of Abbie Crunch, which renders her complicit in this dangerous scenario for young Linc, is potentially a self-criticism of Petry's conservative and conventional public persona in die 1950s; die law-abiding, Puritanical widow Crunch is shown from this one angle to have instincts and perceptions inferior to those of die misogynous thug and whoremaster Hod.
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