Alan M. Wald - Böcker

Wald offers a comprehensive history and reconsideration of the U.S. literary left in the mid-twentieth century. Recovering the central role Marxist-influenced writers played in fiction, poetry, theater, and literary criticism, he explores the lives and work of figures including Richard Wright, Muriel Rukeyser, Mike Gold, Claude McKay, Tillie Olsen, and Meridel Le Sueur.

In this study of two neglected New England poets, Alan Wald challenges the literary culture that has obscured the radical and Marxist heritage of American letters in our century. ""Simply by aspiring to accurate historical remembrance,"" Wald writes, ""this book aims to subvert the currently sanctified canon of letters and the vision of society legitimized by its codification.""John Wheelwright (1897-1940) and Sherry Mangan (1904-1961) were Harvard-educated, avant-garde poets in the 1920s. Influenced by Leon Trotsky, they became revolutionaries during the Great Depression. In this first book to examine the relationship in the United States between modernist poets and Marxist politics, Wald demonstrates that Wheelwright and Mangan defy -- in their personalities and in their literary styles, themes, and achievements -- standard depictions of socialist writers in the 1930s. Wald uses a contemporary Marxist approach of his own to extend the study of American literary radicalism into such areas as the formal features of leftist poetry in the United States, how modernism and Marxism are related, and what happened to the recalcitrant 1930s radicals during the Cold War period.John Ashbery has called Wheelwright's Collected Poems one of the 100 most important books of Western literature of the last thirty-five years. Scholars, however, have virtually ignored Wheelwright. A leader of the Harvard Poetry Society in the post-World War I era, Wheelwright was also an architectural historian, heterodox Anglican, and highly unconventional Boston Brahmin. Before he was killed in a car accident in 1940, Wheelwright had established himself as a legendary figure among Boston-area writers. Wald argues that Wheelwright succeeded in resolving for himself the fundamental paradox faced by the modernist poet who is also a radical -- the urge to write poems that are complex and therefore objectively elitist and the desire to use art to influence the attitudes of a mass audience.Also educated at Harvard, Mangan was a passionate and scholarly classicist. He made a small but distinct mark on American literature in the late 1920s and early 1930s as a poet, novelist, short story writer, critic, editor, and book designer. By the end of the depression, however, he had remade his life, exiling himself to Western Europe and Latin America, where he worked as a journalist for Time, Life, and Fortune and carried out political missions for the Trotskyist Fourth International. Wald concludes that Mangan's writing after the mid-1930s became either impenetrable in its obscure personal symbolism or conventionally realistic.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

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.

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 Passion carries forward the chronicle launched in Exiles 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.

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. 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 introduction 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.

In this wide-ranging new collection the author of the acclaimed The New York Intellectuals surveys the current crisis of the writers and cultural workers radicalized by the 1960s. He argues that the left can draw strength by reconceptualizing its cultural legacy as a rich, diverse stream of political and cultural experiences flowing over six decades. Writing from the Left draws deeply on this tradition, highlighting its contemporary relevance.After an assessment of some classic US Marxist texts, Wald resurrects numerous "lost" radical writers from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, applying today's concerns about race, gender and mass culture to the past. He then analyzes more recent developments in Marxist scholarship, combining oral history, close textual analysis, fresh primary research, and empirically grounded theory to argue that a Marxism based on anti-Stalinist principles can learn much from the hidden, misunderstood legacy of US Communism. Indeed, in his view the importance of anti-racist political struggle in this tradition has been - and should remain - the "great theme" of the US cultural and political left.