In contrast to other scholars who emphasize the affinity of the "New York Intellectuals" for literary modernism and its largely Jewish composition as its defining characteristics, Wald finds these traits to be secondary to the group's agonizing efforts in the 1930s and after to build a Marxist alternative to the official Communist movement. Wald presents an absorbing account of this misunderstood chapter in the history of literary radicalism and the Marxist intellectual tradition in the United States.

With this book, Alan Wald launches a bold and passionate account of the U.S. Literary Left from the 1920s through the 1960s. Exiles from a Future Time, the first volume of a trilogy, focuses on the forging of a Communist-led literary tradition in the 1930s. Exploring writers' intimate lives and heartfelt political commitments, Wald draws on original research in scores of archives and personal collections of papers; correspondence and interviews with hundreds of writers and their friends and families; and a treasure trove of unpublished memoirs, fiction, and poetry.

In...

In this collection of essays, the author combines a series of assessments of classic and lost texts in the US Marxist literary tradition, and analyzes developments in Marxist scholarship by Robin Kelley, Michael Lowy, James Murphy, Paula Rabinowitz and Alexander Saxton. Discussion of fiction, poetry and cultural history is given central place in Wald's analysis. From this perspective he argues that the contemporary concerns of race, gender and culture have created a powerful new leftist critique.

Between February 1864 and April 1865, 41,000 Union prisoners of war were taken to the stockade at Anderson Station, Georgia, where nearly 13,000 of them died. Most contemporary accounts placed the blame for the tragedy squarely on the shoulders of the Confederates who administered the prison or on a conspiracy of higher-ranking officials. According to William Marvel, virulent disease and severe shortages of vegetables, medical supplies, and other necessities combined to create a crisis beyond the captors' control. He also argues that the tragedy was aggravated by the Union decision to suspend...

In this study of two neglected New England poets, Alan Wald challenges the literary culture that has obscured the radical and Marxist heritage of American letters in our century. "Simply by aspiring to accurate historical remembrance," Wald writes, "this book aims to subvert the currently sanctified canon of letters and the vision of society legitimized by its codification."

John Wheelwright (1897-1940) and Sherry Mangan (1904-1961) were Harvard-educated, avant-garde poets in the 1920s. Influenced by Leon Trotsky, they became revolutionaries during the Great Depression. In this first...

American Night, the final volume of an unprecedented trilogy, brings Alan Wald's multigenerational history of Communist writers to a poignant climax. Using new research to explore the intimate lives of novelists, poets, and critics during the Cold War, Wald reveals a radical community longing for the rebirth of the social vision of the 1930s and struggling with a loss of moral certainty as the Communist worldview was being called into question. The resulting literature, Wald shows, is a haunting record of fracture and struggle linked by common structures of feeling, ones more...

The second of three volumes by Alan Wald that track the political and personal lives of several generations of U.S. left-wing writers, Trinity of Passion carries forward the chronicle launched in Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. In this volume Wald delves into literary, emotional, and ideological trajectories of radical cultural workers in the era when the International Brigades fought in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and the United States battled in World War II (1941-45). Probing in rich and haunting detail the controversial...