Proletarian and Radical Writers, 1930s-1940s

PROLETARIAN AND RADICAL WRITERS, 1930s–1940s. Proletarian writing emerged in the 1930s in association with the Communist movement and was characterized by fervent class consciousness. Working-class characters rather than upper- or middle-class characters were the major focus of interest, the vernacular was the preferred language, and concerns about racial, ethnic, and sexual exploitation were often blended with class issues. A few works directly addressed the experiences of radical activists, but most had themes that were derived from nineteenth-century literature. Among these were coming-of-age and on-the-road novels.

The proletarian movement is usually depicted as an American form of the socialist realism advocated by Soviet theorists. While that connection exists, American writers drew on deep national roots. The two most celebrated American stylists of the previous century, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, had been champions of the vernacular and had written about working-class America. Even such a symbol-rich work as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick had the characteristic American concern for the work process. Precedents for socially committed literature that sought to change society were set by abolitionist poets such as John Greenleaf Whittier and novels such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Best-selling socialist authors such as Jack London, Edward Bellamy, and Upton Sinclair had further developed the political novel. Given this tradition, proletarian writers did not feel they were breaking with the American past but fulfilling its egalitarian vision.

Many of the new writers were of the class they wrote about or directly involved in working-class movements. This allowed them to write from “the inside” and bring their readers directly into the mills, homes, and streets of working America. Only a few of the writers were actual members of the Communist Party, but the Party was their political focus. Many were affiliated with various cultural groups such as the John Reed Clubs or the League of American Writers or met in informal groups like the radical screenwriters who gathered in the back room of Larry Edmund’s bookshop in Hollywood. Radical writers often worked in projects sponsored by the New Deal and in trade unions. They worked in different genres simultaneously and published in Communist newspapers or in radical magazines such as the Anvil, New Masses, New Theater, New Theatre and Film, and Partisan Review. While some theorists tried to differentiate the proletarian writer as a specific literary species, the distinction between radical writing in general and specifically proletarian writing remained vague, observed more often in theory than practice. The prestige of the cultural publications of the Communist Party was so high that some of the nation’s best-known writers published in them or helped raise funds for them. Such writers included William Saroyan, Ernest Hemingway, Erskine Caldwell, Dorothy Parker, James Agee, and Archibald MacLeish.

A considerable amount of proletarian writing amounted to a class-modified coming-of-age genre. Thomas Bell’s Out of this Furnace (1941), for example, follows a Slavic steelworker family through titanic duels between Carnegie Steel and the millworkers of Pittsburgh. This novel also deals with working-class marital relationships, a theme Bell addressed more directly in All Brides are Beautiful (1936) and Till I Come Back to You (1943). Another of his novels, There Comes a Time (1946), deals with organizing white-collar bank employees.

Two other well-received novels in a similar vein were Pietro Di Donato’s Christ in Concrete (1939) and Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited (1933). Di Donato’s novel, one of the few to describe the price paid in building the great American cities, centers on a thirteen-year-old Italian boy who takes his father’s place as a bricklayer after the father is buried alive in a construction accident. Conroy’s book, written in the jaunty style found in all of his work, follows the life of a young miner seeking work during the Great Depression. Even better known than these works were James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932–1934), about the working Irish of Chicago, and Mike Gold’s Jews without Money (1930), about the Yiddish culture of New York’s Lower East Side. Changes within an entire family, rather than just an individual, are the concern of Josephine Herbst in a trilogy consisting of The Rope of Gold (1939), Pity Is Not Enough (1933), and The Executioner Waits (1934). Feminist concerns are coequal with economic themes in Meridel Le Sueur’s short story collection Salute to Spring (1940). Like other proletarian authors, Le Sueur often made a connection between poverty and subsequent criminal behavior, and in her prose style sought to bring a lyrical quality to the vernacular idioms of her humble characters.

Proletarian on-the-road or down-and-out novels were less popular in their time, but have developed something of a cult following with the passage of years. Best remembered now is Waiting for Nothing (1935) by Tom Kromer. Written partially while Kromer lived in flophouses, hobo jungles, missions, and freight cars, the novel harrowingly illustrates the day-to-day life of the unemployed and homeless during the Great Depression. Edward Dahlberg’s Bottom Dogs (1930) is another highly respected novel with a similar approach. Worthy of attention for their literary worth as well as their proletarian perspectives are Edward Newhouse’s You Can’t Sleep Here (a New York Hooverville is the setting, 1934), Nelson Algren’s Somebody in Boots (the tribulations of a young Texan, 1935), and William Attaway’s Let Me Breathe Thunder (two migrant laborers ride the rails, 1939). A more surreal and picaresque approach is found in Kenneth Patchen’s The Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941).

Many radical writers brought the reader directly into the factory and fields and then out into the union halls and picket lines. Land of Plenty (1934), by Robert Cantwell, re-creates a savage lumber strike in the Pacific Northwest; The Foundry (1934), by Albert Halper, presents an in-depth evocation of the assembly-line process; and To Make My Bread (1932), by Grace Lumpkin, tackles the legendary Gastonia textile strike. Chester Himes wove racial concerns into two remarkable workplace novels; If He Hollers, Let Him Go (1945) concerns the frame-up of a militant African American shipyard worker during World War II, and Lonely Crusade (1947) centers on how racism and anticommunism within the labor movement affect a radical African American organizer. Another blend of racial and workplace themes is found in William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge (1941), a tale of three brothers from the black South and their interactions with Slavic workers in a steel plant near Pittsburgh. Blood on the Forge was one of the few American novels of its time to directly relate human exploitation to capitalist exploitation of natural resources. In the late 1980s the novel was reissued as part of the Monthly Review Press’s Voices of Resistance series, which features outstanding political novels from around the world. Yet another 1930s novel that addressed racial themes is Grace Lumpkin’s The Sign of Cain (1935).

The most controversial proletarian novels feature the radical organizer, usually identified as a Communist, as their central character. In addition to work already cited, this focus is found in Jake Home (1943), by Ruth McKenney, the story of how a Pennsylvania miner evolves into a Communist activist; This Is Your Day (1937), by Edward Newhouse, a vivid rendering of the daily life of a young Communist organizing rural workers; and Underground Stream (1940), by Albert Maltz, a poignant account of the kidnapping and murder of a Communist auto-union organizer by a fictional Michigan group modeled on Michigan’s fascistic Black Legion. Maltz would become one of the “Hollywood Ten” and was involved in important public debates on the role of the writer in the Communist movement. His other novels include The Cross and the Arrow (a German foundry worker defies the Nazis, 1944), The Journey of Simon McKeever (an aged pipefitter fights for dignity, 1949), A Long Day in a Short Life (racial discrimination in a federal prison, 1957), and A Tale of One January (World War II refugees, 1966).

Variety of theme and style is also a hallmark of the proletarian poets. John Beecher wrote often of southern areas where radicalism had never been a strong tradition. Sterling A. Brown did brilliant work within the ballad form, while Kenneth Fearing and Walter Lowenfels applied modern techniques to traditional radical themes. Lowenfels, who had been an intimate of Henry Miller in Paris, eventually took a twenty-year hiatus from writing to edit a labor paper, but he returned to literary work in the 1960s. At that time he became a link to New Left writers by editing anthologies of politically engaged poetry. The most widely read of these was Where is Vietnam? (1967).

Perhaps the most ambitious of all the radical poets was Thomas McGrath. His Letters to an Imaginary Friend is no less than a radical equivalent to the Cantos of Ezra Pound or the Paterson of William Carlos Williams. Stretching from the 1930s to the 1980s, the novelistic poem combines fact and fantasy in a blend of style meant to render a universal statement on the human condition through the actuality of the American experience. McGrath’s use of the dialogue poem, the “found” poem, snatches of lyrics from popular songs, and other techniques were characteristic of the experimental spirit of most of the radical poets.

Stylistic innovation also concerned prose writers such as Nathanael West and John Dos Passos. Using techniques found in surrealism and expressionism, West savaged mass media and the Horatio Alger myth in four short novels (Miss Lonelyhearts, 1933; The Day of the Locust, 1939; A Cool Million, 1934; The Dream Life of Balso Snell, 1931) that were highly praised by both avant-garde and political critics. John Dos Passos employed Joycean techniques in his epic U.S.A. trilogy (The 42nd Parallel, 1930; 1919, 1932; The Big Money, 1936), generally regarded as the best single radical novel of the period and a major American literary achievement. Dos Passos was highly influenced by the Industrial Workers of the World, and his caution regarding the authoritarianism of the Communist Party led him to adopt increasingly rightist positions, particularly after World War II. In U.S.A. he created a form that used a journalistic narrative as a base around which was entwined stream-of-consciousness sections, evocations of newspaper headlines and popular songs, poetic portraits of political radicals and reactionaries, and complete short stories, sometimes rendered in an impressionistic style.

Classification of proletarian writing by rigid stylistic, thematic, or chronological criteria is highly misleading as so much of the work is too complex for facile definitions. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); Richard Wright’s first two books, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) and Native Son (1940); and Meridel Le Sueur’s various short stories exemplify this difficulty. Even the subgenre of the antimilitary novel produced highly complex works. Outstanding among these was Johnny Got His Gun (1939), by Dalton Trumbo, who decries the brutality of war by adopting the viewpoint of a “basket case,” a soldier who has lost all his limbs in battle. Mixed themes are also found in Truman Nelson’s The Sin of the Prophet (an homage to abolitionist Theodore Parker, 1952), Harriet Arnow’s The Dollmaker (the migration of a hillbilly family to Detroit, 1954), and Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? (the organizing of the Screen Writers Guild, 1941). Some of these were not published until the 1950s and some became the basis for motion pictures or television programs made even later, indications that the impact of the proletarian tradition did not collapse entirely with the end of the 1930s or even the 1940s.

Some of the writers who came to the United States as refugees from the Nazi threat in Europe became part of the radical current. The most successful of these was Stefan Heym, a refugee from Germany who began to write in English. His best-selling The Crusaders (1948) dealt with the American army fighting in the European theater as if it were a capitalist venture. One of the novel’s features is that individuals who appear to be major characters keep getting killed off, as in a real war, yet are replaced by a new cast of characters who re-create class positions in a manner that seems realistic, if not inevitable. During the McCarthy era, Heym wrote Goldsborough (1954), a novel of oppressed miners who turn to radical solutions. This was to be the last book he wrote in the United States. Distraught by the rise of McCarthyism, Heym followed the example of Brecht and repatriated to East Berlin, where he forged an uneasy record of writing novels critical of the system from a decidedly Marxist perspective.

An expatriate often overlooked in accounts of American radical writers is the elusive B. Traven, who successfully hid his true identity and national origins for decades. His rationale for doing so was to place all attention on his work, which proved to have enormous popular as well as critical appeal. Most of his novels deal with exploited Indian peasants in Mexico and the horrible working conditions in the jungle lumber camps: The Government (1931), The Carreta (1935), March to the Monteria (1933), Rebellion of the Hanged (1938), The General of the Jungle (1940). He also wrote about wandering American Wobblies in Mexico (The Cotton Pickers, 1929), stranded merchant seamen (The Death Ship, 1934), American fortune hunters (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 1927), and American imperialists (The White Rose, 1935).

During the war years, the emphasis on class conflict and opposition to militarism, which had been dominant radical themes, gave way to a perceived need to foster national unity in the war against fascism. With the end of the conflict, the old themes were not easily resurrected. The dubious role Communists were acting out in Eastern Europe and a growing awareness of the repressive nature of the Stalinist regime moved many writers away from former commitments, some adopting an openly critical view of the Soviet system, either from a Right or Left perspective. McCarthyism accelerated the ideological disarray. Outright blacklists, as was the case with Hollywood screenwriters, were rare, but graylists were not. Radical editors were driven out of publishing houses, grants were not awarded radical writers, book clubs rarely adopted radical books, radical critics lost their jobs in the review media, and radical professors were ejected from universities. The cultural institutions of the Communist Party collapsed and attempts to create new radical book clubs or literary magazines were unsuccessful.

Writers with radical roots often quit their literary work in despair, but some persevered and a few prospered despite the new political climate. Authors such as Ruth McKenney, William Motley, Irwin Shaw, Alfred Hayes, and Howard Fast would find success with work that lacked the old radical bite. Others like Richard Wright and Nelson Algren would move with new intellectual tides of dissent. Wright became identified with the Third World perspective and Algren forged links with the French existentialists and the small-press movement in America while writing novels about drugs, the destitute, and boxers that found a popular audience. A number of the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriters found work as television writers for the series You Are There and a few eventually resumed Hollywood careers and scripted important films such as Spartacus (1960) and M*A*S*H (1970). Tom McGrath stayed viable through regional associations and the alternative press while African Americans such as Langston Hughes and Claude McKay became more identified with racial consciousness rather than class consciousness, a perception they sometimes encouraged. Meridel Le Sueur would fall into anonymity until her work was revived by the woman’s movement of the late 1960s, which related to her feminism more than to her socialism. Writers like James T. Farrell who continued to write in the old mold were usually dismissed by reviewers as being out-of-date. A significant rightward drift was also evident. John Dos Passos’s Mid-Century (1960) was as conservative as U.S.A. had been radical. Budd Schulberg was typical of former radicals who became concerned with unions and revolutions that had gone wrong (longshoremen in Waterfront, 1955; teamsters in Everything That Moves, 1980; and Cuba in Sanctuary V, 1969).

Most crippling to any radical continuum was that no new wave of leftist writers emerged from the experiences of the war years. For a moment Norman Mailer seemed to be an exception. His Naked and the Dead (1948) dealt with an American military that flirted with fascism and his Barbary Shore (1951) featured Trotskyists. Mailer worked for the Progressive Party, was involved with the National Guardian, and helped finance the Village Voice; but his career moved toward ever more sensationalist and individualistic themes, his liberalism often containing elements usually associated with the Right. James Jones, another best-selling new author, included a wonderful homage to the Industrial Workers of the World in From Here to Eternity (1951), a sequence dropped from the film version. His work, however, had only dim notions of class conflict that were often enmeshed within a military system with its own set of particulars.

Intellectual disfavor of radical literature became the norm in universities when political scientists declared an end to ideology and English professors adopted a “New Criticism” that devalued writing that was politically committed. Despite the resilience of individual authors and some new standard-bearers in the 1960s, the literary movement that had blossomed in the 1930s was more or less spent by the early 1950s. The next literary rebellion with radical overtones would be that of the Beat writers. Their movement would be more cultural than political, and their hostility to all forms of authoritarianism would extend beyond Stalin to Lenin and Marx.

Brown, Sterling A., Arthur P. Davis, and Ulysses Lee, eds. The Negro Caravan. New York: Citadel, 1941.

Conroy, Jack, and Curt Johnson, eds. Writers in Revolt: The Anvil Anthology, 1933–1940. New York: Lawrence Hill, 1973.

Foley, Barbara. Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941., Durham, NC: Duke University Press,1993.

Maltz, Albert. “What Shall We Ask of Writers?” New Masses 12 February 1946. Responses in New Masses by Howard Fast (26 February 1946), Joseph North (26 February 1946), John Howard Lawson (19 March 1946), and William Z. Foster (23 April 1946). Responses in the Daily Worker by Mike Gold (12 and 23 February 1946) and Samuel Sillen (11–16 February 1946).

Nekola, Charlotte, and Paula Rabinowitz, eds. Writing Red: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930–1940. New York: Feminist Press, 1987.

North, Joseph, ed., with introduction by Maxwell Geismar. New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties. New York: International Publishers, 1969.

Salzman, Jack, with Barry Wallenstein, eds. Years of Protest: A Collection of American Writing of the 1930s. New York: Pegasus, 1967.

Swados, Harvey, ed. The American Writer and the Great Depression. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966.

Wald, Alan M. Writing from the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics. London: Verso, 1994.