In the late 1930s, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, and Ernest Hemingway wrote novels that won critical acclaim and popular success: The Grapes of Wrath, Native Son, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. All ...three writers were involved with the Left at the time, and that commitment informed their fiction. Milton Cohen examines their motives for involvement with the Left; their novels' political themes; and why they separated from the Left after the novels were published. These writers were deeply conflicted about their political commitments, and Cohen explores the tensions that arose between politics and art, resulting in the abandonment of a political attachment.
This essay examines the validity of three political claims in John Dos Passos's novel, 1919: that the Morgan loans forced the United States into World War I; that "oil was trumps" at the Peace ...Conference; and that President Wilson was "trimmed" by Georges Clemenceau and David Lloyd George, destroying his liberal peace objectives.
Several times in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, the protagonist Robert Jordan thinks about the "true book" he will write after the Spanish Civil War (SCW) ends. The immediate answers are ...textual and can be found in Jordan's experiences as a partizan and in what he's learned about the war in his close dealings with the Soviets, who were covertly running it and who strongly influenced the Republican government.1 But historical and biographical contexts are equally important because Jordan is a projection of his author, and the novel aims to correct misrepresentations and replace myths about the war and the Loyalists with disillusioning truths- misrepresentations the author not only knew about but repeated and defended in his journalism and previous fiction and drama about the war. Hemingway also aimed at another kind of truth in the novel: the truths of moral ambiguity in military action. ...before we turn to Jordan's experiences, we must briefly consider Hemingway's. When Hemingway began writing For Whom the Bell Tolls on 15 February 1939, Barcelona had already fallen to Franco's forces, and six weeks later the SCW itself ended with the fall of Madrid. ...unlike his earlier writing about the war-the 31 news dispatches for NANA (Watson, Introduction 4), the 18 magazine articles for Ken and other magazines, the 5 short stories and the play The Fifth Column-nearly all of this new novel came into being when the war was over, when whatever he chose to reveal about it could no longer damage the...
Different as they were as poets, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Robert Frost, and Williams Carlos Williams grappled with the highly charged literary politics of the 1930s in comparable ways. As ...other writers moved sharply to the Left, and as leftist critics promulgated a proletarian aesthetics, these modernist poets keenly felt the pressure of the times and politicized literary scene. All four poets saw their reputations critically challenged in these years and felt compelled to respond to the new politics, literary and national, in distinct ways, ranging from rejection to involvement.  Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics closely examines the dynamics of these responses: what these four poets wrote—in letters, essays, lectures, fiction (for Williams), and most importantly, in their poems; what they believed politically and aesthetically; how critics, particularly leftist critics, reviewed their work; how these poets reacted to that criticism and to the broader milieu of leftism. Each poet’s response and its subsequent impact on his poetic output is a unique case study of the conflicting demands of art and politics in a time of great social change. 
Illuminates the development of Hemingway's themes and techniques and his future course as a stylist and writer.In 1924 Ernest Hemingway published a small book of eighteen vignettes, each little more ...than one page long, with a small press in Paris. Titled in our time, the volume was later absorbed into Hemingway's story collection In Our Time. Those vignettes, as Milton Cohen demonstrates in Hemingway's Laboratory, reveal a range of voices, narrative strategies, and fictional interests more wide-ranging and experimental than any other extant work of Hemingway's. Further, they provide a vivid view of his earliest tendencies and influences, first manifestations of the style that would become his hallmark, and daring departures into narrative forms that he would forever leave behind. Many of the chapters are pointillistic glimpses of violence--bullfights, a botched execution, the fleeting thoughts of the wounded on the battlefield. Others reach back into childhood. Still others adopt the wry, mannered voice of English aristocracy. Though critics have often read these chapters as secondary asides to the longer stories that constitute the commercial collection, Cohen argues that not only do the vignettes merit consideration as a unit unto themselves, but that they exhibit a plethora of styles and narrative gambits that show Hemingway at his most versatile.The final section examines in detail the individual chapters of in our time, their historical origins, their drafts, themes, and styles. The result is an account of what is arguably Hemingway's most crucial formative period.
None of this is particularly new, but a changed Krebs sees it with new eyes. ... his dilemma; conform, lie, and assimilate, or stay aloof, try to maintain some shred of integrity, and suffer ...loneliness.
Though actively involved in leftist causes and committees throughout the 1930s, William Carlos Williams had an almost uncanny knack for getting between warring factions and alienating power centers ...of the Left, particularly "Partisan Review". This paper examines three such incidents: two in which "PR" intentionally humiliated the poet in 1936-37, and one in which Williams joined, signed petitions, then resigned from several leftist splinter groups battling each other in 1939. Among the reasons considered for these mishaps are: Williams's political naïveté about factionalism and editorial good faith; his skepticism regarding communism; his desire to be published in the leading leftist magazines; and the byzantine political alignments of the late 1930s. Ironically, Williams's own poetry and fiction in the 1930s show a genuine empathy (without cant or cliché) for the working class - a quality that was more talked about than achieved in leftist circles.
Illuminates the development of Hemingway’s themes and techniques and his future course as a stylist and writer. In 1924 Ernest Hemingway published a small book of eighteen vignettes, each ...little more than one page long, with a small press in Paris. Titled in our time , the volume was later absorbed into Hemingway’s story collection In Our Time . Those vignettes, as Milton Cohen demonstrates in Hemingway’s Laboratory , reveal a range of voices, narrative strategies, and fictional interests more wide-ranging and experimental than any other extant work of Hemingway’s. Further, they provide a vivid view of his earliest tendencies and influences, first manifestations of the style that would become his hallmark, and daring departures into narrative forms that he would forever leave behind. Many of the chapters are pointillistic glimpses of violence--bullfights, a botched execution, the fleeting thoughts of the wounded on the battlefield. Others reach back into childhood. Still others adopt the wry, mannered voice of English aristocracy. Though critics have often read these chapters as secondary asides to the longer stories that constitute the commercial collection, Cohen argues that not only do the vignettes merit consideration as a unit unto themselves, but that they exhibit a plethora of styles and narrative gambits that show Hemingway at his most versatile. The final section examines in detail the individual chapters of in our time , their historical origins, their drafts, themes, and styles. The result is an account of what is arguably Hemingway’s most crucial formative period.
The contributors range from graduate students and recent PhDs to senior scholars working in the fields of medieval studies, art history, English literature, poetics, early modern studies, musicology, ...and geography. All are engaged in academic writing, but some of the contributors also publish in other genres, includes poetry and fiction. Several contributors maintain a very active online presence, including blogs and websites; all are committed to strengthening the bonds of community, both in person and online, which helps to explain the effervescent sense of collegiality that pervades the volume, creating linkages across essays and extending outward into the wide world of writers and readers.
