Conroy, Jack

CONROY, JACK (1898–1990). A premier Midwestern novelist, editor, and folklorist, Jack Wesley Conroy was connected with the region from the time of his birth in the Monkey Nest coal camp on the outskirts of Moberly, Missouri. His Irish immigrant father, who had studied for the priesthood, died in a mining accident when Conroy was quite young, as did a brother and two half-brothers. In his teens, Conroy started work as an apprentice carman in the Wabash Railroad shops in Moberly and served as recording secretary for his union local. After joining the nationwide Great Railroad Strike of 1922, Conroy found himself blacklisted from any further railroad employment. He spent much of the 1920s as a migratory worker, sometimes riding the rails with Wobblies. His main source of education was the famous “Little Blue Books” of E. Haldeman-Julius.

After writing some poetry and deciding it was not his genre, Conroy joined with Ralph Cheney in establishing the Rebel Poet group and magazine in 1928. This magazine, proclaimed “The Internationale of Song,” established Conroy as the center of an energetic, talented, and discontented group of writers and artists, including H. H. Lewis, “Plowboy Poet of the Gumbo” (Conroy himself later became known, in Populist fashion, as the “Sage of Moberly”). During this period, Conroy coedited militant anthologies entitled Unrest, 1929–1931. After differing with Cheney, Conroy began a new magazine called the Anvil (1933–1935), a parallel experiment to the John Reed Clubs. The Anvil’s motto was We Prefer Crude Vigor to Polished Banality, and it attracted both readers and contributors from a widespread working-class audience. Its authors included Richard Wright, Kenneth Patchen, and Meridel Le Sueur. Communist Party support made possible a circulation of some five thousand.
Meanwhile, Conroy’s stories and sketches of working-class life had caught the eye of H. L. Mencken, who published several of them in his American Mercury. With Mencken’s encouragement, Conroy drew these together for his best-known work, The Disinherited (1933), a novel. Widely praised as a broad-ranging chronicle of a young worker’s exposure to life in rural and mining villages in the context of deepening economic and social crises, The Disinherited was one of the most authentic and important “proletarian” novels of the age.

Conroy successively worked on the staff of the Federal Writers Project, where he became the center of a rowdy, dissident group of Midwestern bohemians called the “Parallel Centrists,” gave an address at the American Writers Congress in 1935, and left Missouri for Chicago. In the meantime, he had been pressured by Communist cultural functionaries to relinquish control of the Anvil to a group of New York editors and writers around Philip Rahv and William Phillips, who excluded Conroy and soon transformed the project into a modernist-Trotskyist magazine, the Partisan Review. In Chicago, Conroy joined Nelson Algren in publishing the New Anvil (1939–1940), which continued the earlier project of publishing working-class writers, this time including Frank Yerby, Margaret Walker, Tom McGrath, and Karl Shapiro. He also collected stories of industrial folklore (some of which appeared in B. A. Botkin’s Treasury of American Folklore [1944]) and befriended Arna Bontemps, with whom he wrote an account of the rural-to-urban migration of black Americans, They Seek a City (1945).

In order to support his family, Conroy became the literary editor of an encyclopedia in Chicago for two decades. He returned home to Moberly in 1966. He continued to play an important role encouraging younger writers, during a career in which by his own account he “must have written a million letters.” In 1984 Moberly honored her “Sage” with a day of celebrations and discussions.

Conroy, Jack, and Curt Johnson, eds. Writers in Revolt: The Anvil Anthology. New York: Lawrence Hill, 1973.

New Letters (special issue) 39 (fall 1972).

Wixson, Douglas C. Introduction to The Weed King and Other Stories, by Jack Conroy. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Wixson, Douglas. Worker-Writer in America: Jack Conroy and the Tradition of Midwestern Literary Radicalism, 1898–1990. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Jack Conroy Papers, 1864-1994. Inventory. The Newberry Library. https://mms.newberry.org/xml/xml_files/Conroy.xml