The rubric, Bohemian Bolsheviks, captures Alan Walds sustained fascination with persistent contradictions between the image of Left political commitment and the actuality of experience, especially in relation to cultural work and cultural workers. Marxist political alignment engages a welter of intimate and biographical factors enriching the record of a varied history of fiction, poetry, literary criticism, and other intellectual practices. Exploring a field of study marked by enduring paradoxes of modernity, this volume is a sharp reminder that historical narrative not only shapes our sense of the terrain under our feetbut also the horizon in front of us.
Acknowledgments
Introduction Marxism and Literary Radicalism: Methodology, Memory, and the
Lure of Easy History
Part1 The Left in US Literature
1 Inconvenient Truths: The Communist Conundrum in Life and Art
2 The Culture War Over Literary Communism
3 Imagined Solidarities: The Bolshevik Revolution and the Literary Left
4 Reconstructing the Humanscape of Left Culture and Commitment: An
Interview with Alan Wald
5 Noir and the Ebb of Radical Hope
Part2 Fiction and Poetry
6 Steinbeck and the Proletarian Novel
7 Back to the Future in Howard Fasts Freedom Road
8 American Poetry and the Popular Front
9 The Murdered Dreams of Aaron Kramer: A Marxist Poet In The American
Century
10 Hero International Brigade
11 Marxism and the Modernist Poet: A Tale of Two Delmores
Part3 Gender and the Left
12 Bohemian Bolsheviks After World WarII: A Minority Within a Minority
13 Sanora Babb in Her Time and Ours
14 Sexing the Left: Interview with Alan M.Wald, by William J.Maxwell
15 Wheelwright and His Kind
16 Motleys Men: The Queer Haunting of We Fished All Night
17 The Trotskyist Time Forgot: The Permanent Rebellion of Nicolas Calas
18 The Red and the Queer
Part4 Race and Class
19 The Marxist Imagination of Theodore Ward
(September15, 1902May8, 1983)
20 Race and the Logic of Capital
21 Protesting the Protest Novel: Richard Wrights The Man Who Lived
Underground
22 The Black Internationalism of William Gardner Smith
23 Blood on the Forge: A Masterful Proletarian Novel
24 From Triple Oppression to Freedom Dreams
Part5 Commitment
25 A Seemingly Incongruous Alliance: Bryan Palmer, Revolutionary Teamsters
26 Trotsky: Between the Power and the Dream
27 Fascinating Antifascism: Enzo Traversos Fire and Blood
28 A Theater for the Poor: Cleveland and SDS/ERAP in the Mid-1960s
29 Gramscis Gift
30 H.Chandler Davis, a Lifelong Radical and a Moral Touchstone for the Left
31 The Straight and the Crooked: BDS Versus Settler-Colonialism
Part6 The Radical Vision
32 Riddle Me This, Comrade: 100 Years of US Communism
33 Protest, Passion, Politics
34 Reaching for Revolution
35 The Present of Future Things
36 Astonished by the Present: The Impatient Life of Daniel Bensäid
37 Missives for the Future: Michael Löwys Close Encounters with the US Left
Bibliography
Index
Alan M. Wald, H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, is the author of eight books on United States Literary Radicalism, including The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (1987).
