Hicks, Granville

HICKS, GRANVILLE (1901–1982). One of the most influential practitioners of the Marxist literary criticism developed in this country during the 1930s, Granville Hicks was ideologically located somewhere between the hard-line leftism of Michael Gold and the liberal Marxism of Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley. He tried to practice a criticism that brought social and economic questions to the center of the critical debate.

Hicks studied theology for two years after graduating from Harvard in 1923, but abandoned his plans to become a minister, returned to Harvard for an M.A. in English, and took a job at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he taught until he was fired for political reasons in 1935. He joined the Communist Party in the early 1930s, became the literary editor of the New Masses when it reappeared as a weekly on 2 January 1934, and helped to make it one of the best Left literary journals of the 1930s. During this crucial period, in addition to his numerous articles and reviews, Hicks produced three important books: The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature since the Civil War (1933; rev. ed., 1935), a biography of John Reed (1936), and Figures of Transition: A Study of British Literature at the End of the Nineteenth Century (1939). Although he quit the Communist Party after the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 and later repudiated his own Marxism in autobiographical works such as Part of the Truth (1965), Hicks remained a literary critic until 1977—most notably as a literary columnist for the New Leader during the 1950s and the Saturday Review during the 1960s—and his Marxist orientation was one important underpinning of his later critical practice.

Hicks’s limitations as a Marxist critic are clear. His Marxism was often puritanical in bias and mechanical in application. Worse, by demanding that literature be used as a class weapon, he limited its range and possibilities. “The critic will demand,” he wrote in “The Crisis in American Criticism” (1933), “that the author’s point of view be that of the vanguard of the proletariat.” On the other hand, his support for proletarian literature helped encourage some of the younger writers who emerged in the 1930s, and his discovery of a social-realist past (in the literature of Whitman, Sinclair, London, et al.) gave them an American literary tradition to join.

Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.

Bicker, Robert J. Granville Hicks: An Annotated Bibliography. Emporia, KS: Emporia State Research Studies, 1968.

Levenson, Leah, and Jerry Natterstad. Granville Hicks: The Intellectual in Mass Society. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993. Long, Terry L. Granville Hicks. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1981.

Robbins, Jack Alan, ed. Granville Hicks in the New Masses. Port Jefferson, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1974.

Granville Hicks Papers. Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries. https://library.syr.edu/digital/guides/h/hicks_g.htm