Alan M. Wald
Biographical Note
Alan M. Wald, H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, is the author of eight books on United States Literary Radicalism, including The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (1987).
Readership
This book is particularly relevant for students, activists, and scholars interested in various aspects of the Marxist Left’s cultural tradition, especially (but not exclusively) in the United States. With its wealth of original and often rare research on the subject by a leading academic in the field, it should also appeal to university and institute libraries.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction– Marxism and Literary Radicalism: Methodology, Memory, and the Lure of Easy History
Part 1 The Left in US Literature
1 Inconvenient Truths: The Communist Conundrum in Life and Art
2 The Culture War Over Literary Communism
3 Imagined Solidarities: The Bolshevik Revolution and the Literary Left
4 Reconstructing the ‘Humanscape’ of Left Culture and Commitment: An Interview with Alan Wald
5 Noir and the Ebb of Radical Hope
Part 2 Fiction and Poetry
6 Steinbeck and the Proletarian Novel
7 Back to the Future in Howard Fast’s Freedom Road
8 American Poetry and the Popular Front
9 The Murdered Dreams of Aaron Kramer: A Marxist Poet In The ‘American Century’
10 Hero– International Brigade
11 Marxism and the Modernist Poet: A Tale of Two Delmores
Part 3 Gender and the Left
12 Bohemian Bolsheviks After World WarII: A Minority Within a Minority
13 Sanora Babb in Her Time and Ours
14 ‘Sexing the Left: Interview with Alan M.Wald,’ by William J.Maxwell
15 Wheelwright and His Kind
16 Motley’s Men: The Queer Haunting of We Fished All Night
17 The Trotskyist Time Forgot: The Permanent Rebellion of Nicolas Calas
18 The Red and the Queer
Part 4 Race and Class
19 The Marxist Imagination of Theodore Ward
(September15, 1902–May8, 1983)
20 Race and the Logic of Capital
21 Protesting the Protest Novel: Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground
22 The Black Internationalism of William Gardner Smith
23 Blood on the Forge: A Masterful Proletarian Novel
24 From ‘Triple Oppression’ to ‘Freedom Dreams’
Part 5 Commitment
25 ‘A Seemingly Incongruous Alliance’: Bryan Palmer, Revolutionary Teamsters
26 Trotsky: Between the Power and the Dream
27 Fascinating Antifascism: Enzo Traverso’s Fire and Blood
28 A Theater for the Poor: Cleveland and SDS/ERAP in the Mid-1960s
29 Gramsci’s Gift
30 H.Chandler Davis, a Lifelong Radical and a Moral Touchstone for the Left
31 The Straight and the Crooked: BDS Versus Settler-Colonialism
Part 6 The Radical Vision
32 Riddle Me This, Comrade: 100 Years of US Communism
33 Protest, Passion, Politics
34 Reaching for Revolution
35 The Present of Future Things
36 Astonished by the Present: The Impatient Life of Daniel Bensäid
37 Missives for the Future: Michael Löwy’s Close Encounters with the US Left
Bibliography
Index