Wald offers a comprehensive history and reconsideration of the U.S. literary left in the mid-twentieth century. Recovering the central role Marxist-influenced writers played in fiction, poetry, theater, and literary criticism, he explores the lives and work of figures including Richard Wright, Muriel Rukeyser, Mike Gold, Claude McKay, Tillie Olsen, and Meridel Le Sueur.
About the Author :
Linda M. Grasso is Associate Professor of English at York College, City University of New York.
Review :
"Alan Wald demolishes the myth of a cultural commissar forcing radical writers to follow Moscow's artistic line. In its place, he offers a fascinating portrayal of a group of gifted left-wing poets and novelists pursuing their own intensely personal literary and political trajectories." -- Ellen Schrecker, author of Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America
"An indispensable addition to the library of anyone interested in twentieth-century American cultural history. . . . Unquestionably a landmark work of scholarship." -- New England Quarterly
"Offers a great deal of consistently original, often entertaining, and always rigorous humane scholarship. . . . An essential corrective to decades of dogmatic scholarship that ignores or misidentifies the diversity of the American literary Left. [Wald's] dedicated spadework has brought to the surface much that has been neglected in the rich and varied history of dissenting traditions, a history to which many of us may well need to turn more regularly in years to come."--Studies in Contemporary Jewry
"One of the most refreshing studies of the 20th century American Communist movement of recent times. . . . Wald's valuable work brings to life stories of many of the leaders and participants in the cultural movement closely associated with the Communist Party USA from the 1920s into the 1950s. This contribution . . . lends balance and depth to a highly contested and politically charged historical subject." -- Political Affairs
"Scholars in this area will find themselves consulting it as the encyclopedia on the subject. . . . Exiles is one excellent and inspiring answer to how one might evaluate Communist influence on this multifarious, heterodox, unorganized, distinctly different, diffuse and scattered group of people who found themselves influenced by, in the orbit of, and in some cases deeply committed to the radical Left."--Against the Current
"The book's publication is an important event. . . . Wald brings to this study a fresh angle that neither celebrates nor denigrates the literary production of Communist writers simply because of the manifest politics found in their texts."--Journal of American History
"The sheer range of Wald's research is often astonishing. . . . The chief delight of Exiles from a Future Time is the abundance of characters -- a few of the downright wacky -- who people Wald's pages."--In These Times
"Wald is one of this generation's finest scholars of the literary Left. . . . He breaks new ground in many ways. . . . Wald's study is richer in context than any other book in its field."--CHOICE
"Wald's enterprise is distinguished by his sympathy for his writers' existential struggle and his expansive notion of [literature]. . . . One could use his work to assemble a respectable mid-twentieth-century canon of pop Modernist and social realist left literature. . . . [Wald's] complicating of the received canon and deepening of individual political conflicts . . . makes one look forward to the final panel of his triptych."--The Nation
"Wald's study emphasizes biography in order to illumine the connection between political convictions and literary art. The result blends literary scholarship and oral history. . . . Valuable for assessing the contributions of numerous individual writers." -- Library Journal
