Frank, Waldo

FRANK, WALDO (1889–1967). An influential novelist, essayist, and social-cultural historian, Waldo David Frank was born to a comfortable Jewish middle-class family in Long Branch, New Jersey, and raised in New York City. He received B.A. and M.A. degrees simultaneously from Yale University in 1911.
In the fall of 1916, Frank became an associate editor of the Seven Arts, a short-lived but influential arts/cultural magazine that had taken a pacifist position toward the U.S. entry into World War I. Frank later served as a contributing editor of the New Masses and New Republic.

In 1917 Frank published The Unwelcome Man, the first of a series of innovative fiction titles that culminated with Chalk Face (1924). Though marred by a naive romanticism, these works were perhaps the first American use of stream-of-consciousness technique. Frank developed a synthetic style in which poetry mixed with prose and varieties of typographical styles and layouts. The small school of like-minded writers around him included Jean Toomer, Evelyn Scott, Cyril K. Scott, Sam Ornitz, and Isidor Schneider. Like several of these writers, Frank was deeply concerned with social and political problems, above all the integration of the individual into the modern social order. The major themes of his novel Holiday (1923) involved race relations, for whose understanding Frank had disguised himself as an African American during a tour of the South with Jean Toomer.

After 1924 Frank turned increasingly to nonfiction. His first in a series of historical-social studies, Our America (1919), reflected his characteristic concern with the destructive individualism of U.S. society and the antidotes he found in elements of apparently archaic societies elsewhere. Several of his later books—Virgin Spain, America Hispana, South American Journal, and Cuba, Prophetic Island—dealt with Iberian and Latin American cultures. Throughout, he sought to discover and explain alternative modes of civilization; increasingly, he denounced the effects of U.S. imperialism upon these still incompletely modernized, rationalized, and bourgeoisified systems. Within the United States, these works were generally misunderstood as mere travel literature. He intended to show, as he argued forcefully at the 1935 American Writers Congress, that the building of socialism had never been understood as a cultural and human problem and that even American Left intellectuals had allowed themselves to be “taken over [by] the philosophy of the American capitalist culture that we are sworn to overthrow.”

Intermittently, Frank threw himself into political activism. He played an important role as an organizer for the Non-Partisan League in Kansas (1919), as a lecturer for the Friends of the Soviet Union (after a trip to Russia in 1931), as chair of the Independent Miners Relief Committee in Harlan County (for which he was assaulted by vigilantes) in 1932, and as protest leader against mistreatment of such varied victims as Chinese intellectuals and the “Bonus Marchers.” Like many other writers, he had a tumultuous relationship with the American Communists. A significant figure in the 1932 League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford, he toured with Earl Browder in Browder’s 1936 campaign, and served as outstanding spokesman at early Congress of American Writers events. Questioning Russian policies as early as 1935, he broke with Communist politics in his report to the International Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, protesting Stalin’s purges, and abandoned Popular Front organizations in 1939. Although he was less active politically after World War II, Frank was an early, if critical, supporter of Fidel Castro, serving as 1960 temporary chair of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

Bittner, William. The Novels of Waldo Frank. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1955.

Carter, Paul J. Waldo Frank. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1967.

Pfeiffer, Kathleen (ed.), Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010.

Trachtenberg, Alan, ed. Memoirs of Waldo Frank. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973.

Waldo Frank papers, Ms. Coll. 823. Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania. Finding Aid. University of Pennsylvania Libraries. http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/ead/ead.html?id=EAD_upenn_rbml_PUSpMsColl823