McGrath, Tom

McGRATH, TOM (1916–1990). One of America’s most prolific and intrepid radical poets, Thomas Matthew McGrath was born in new Sheldon, North Dakota, at the outset of the great Non-Partisan League period of the state’s history. McGrath’s father, a farmer, was sympathetic to the Industrial Workers of the World as well. This rural experience was critical to the formation of McGrath’s consciousness and to his sensibility from his literary beginnings to his latest works.

After studying at the University of North Dakota and receiving a B.A., McGrath was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. Because of World War II, he attended graduate school at Louisiana State University instead. For a time in 1942, McGrath worked as a welder in the New Jersey shipyards and became active with the Communist Party. The brutal conditions of work, and penetration of unions by organized crime, helped form the basis of an important collection of poems, Longshot O’Leary’s Garland of Practical Poesie (1949), and a novel, This Coffin Has No Handles (1984).

After the war and army service in Alaska, McGrath took the Rhodes Scholarship at New College, Oxford, and in 1951 accepted a teaching position at Los Angeles State College. In 1953 he refused in defiant terms to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee, and he was dismissed from his academic position. Regarded on the Left as an especially promising political writer, he continued his work as editorial assistant on the short-lived Mainstream (1946–1947) and on a science-fiction novel, The Gates of Ivory, The Gates of Horn (1957). He also commenced a multilayered narrative “pseudo-autobiography” (McGrath’s own description), including narratives from the frontier heritage of North Dakota, the crushing of the Industrial Workers of the World, life on the New York waterfront, and the defeat of the Left. This Letter to an Imaginary Friend has appeared in four sections. Parts 1 and 2 were published by Swallow Press in 1969 and parts 3 and 4 by Cooper Canyon Press in 1985. McGrath had three volumes of his selected poetry published since the early 1960s: New and Selected Poems (1964), The Movie at the End of the World (1972), and Selected Poems (1988). A documentary on his life and work also bears the title The Movie at the End of the World. A Soviet edition of his selected work was published in Russian by Raduga in Moscow (1984), and his novel This Coffin Has No Handles was published in their journal Foreign Literature (1987).

Gibbons, Reginald and Terrence Des Press. Thomas McGrath: Life and the Poem. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.

“The Dream Champ.” Special issue of North Dakota Quarterly (fall 1982).

“Thomas McGrath: Life and the Poem.” Special issue of TriQuarterly (fall 1987).

Stern, Fred, ed. The Revolutionary Poet in the United States. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988.