Swados, Harvey

SWADOS, HARVEY (1920–1972). Novelist, short-story writer, critic, and journalist, Harvey Swados left a small but unique mark on radical literary culture. Born in Buffalo, New York, he was influenced by his sister, Felice, also a novelist, to join the Young Communist League while still in high school. In 1940, at the time he was a senior at the University of Michigan, Swados was converted to Trotskyism and subsequently joined Max Shachtman’s Workers Party.

Although he drifted away from the Workers Party in 1942, Swados maintained an independent radical stance for the rest of his life. He was profoundly affected by his youthful work experiences in aircraft factories and, later, in an auto plant, as well as by two years in the merchant marine during World War II. In 1962, a collection of essays called A Radical’s America promoted a vision of socialism decidedly to the left of liberalism and independent of all existing states. In his last years he was a militant opponent of the Vietnam War.

Several of Swados’s novels are of special interest to issues and episodes in the history of American radicalism. On the Line (1957) describes the lives of nine assembly-line workers to dramatize the effects of the work process under capitalism. Standing Fast (1971) chronicles the radicalization and deradicalization of members of his generation, drawing primarily upon Workers Party history. The posthumously published Celebration (1974) presents the diary of the ninety-year-old Samuel Lumen, whose life telescopes many of the ambiguities of the twentieth-century radical intellectual.

These books are noteworthy for their painful honesty and highly developed sense of craft, but weak in communicating the ideas animating the left-wing movements he depicts. Swados’s novels and short stories are also remarkable for their autonomy from the fashions of the times in which he wrote.

Howe, Irving. “On Harvey Swados.” Massachusetts Review 24, no. 3 (fall 1983).

Wald, Alan M. The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.