Explore the vast range of titles available.

For a generation, Alan M. Wald'sThe New York Intellectualshas stood as the authoritative account of an often misunderstood chapter in the history of a celebrated tradition among literary radicals in the United States. His passionate investigation of over half a century of dissident Marxist thought, Jewish internationalism, fervent political activism, and the complex art of the literary imagination is enriched by more than one hundred personal interviews, unparalleled primary research, and critical interpretations of novels and short stories depicting the inner lives of committed writers and thinkers. Wald's commanding biographical portraits of rebel outsiders who mostly became insiders retains its resonance today and includes commentary on Max Eastman, Elliot Cohen, Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook, Tess Slesinger, Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, Irving Kristol, Irving Howe, Hannah Arendt, and more. With a new preface by the author that tracks the rebounding influence of these intellectuals in the era of Occupy and Bernie Sanders, this anniversary edition shows that the trajectory and ideological ordeals of the New York intellectual Left still matters today.

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 Passioncarries forward the chronicle launched inExiles 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 impact of the Popular Front on literary culture, he explores the ethical and aesthetic challenges that pro-Communist writers faced.Wald presents a cross section of literary talent, from the famous to the forgotten, the major to the minor. The writers examined include Len Zinberg (a.k.a. Ed Lacy), John Oliver Killens, Irwin Shaw, Albert Maltz, Ann Petry, Chester Himes, Henry Roth, Lauren Gilfillan, Ruth McKenney, Morris U. Schappes, and Jo Sinclair. He also uncovers dramatic new information about Arthur Miller's complex commitment to the Left.Confronting heartfelt questions about Jewish masculinity, racism at the core of liberal democracy, the corrosion of utopian dreams, and the thorny interaction between antifascism and Communism, Wald re-creates the intellectual and cultural landscape of a remarkable era.

In the new edition of this definitive work on the history of the revolutionary socialist current in the United States that came to be identified as \"American Trotskyism,\" Paul Le Blanc offers fresh reflections on this history for scholars and activists in the twenty-first century. Includes a preface written especially for the new edition of this distinctive work. Paul Le Blanc is a professor of History at La Roche College and author of Choice Award–winning book A Freedom Budget for All Americans.

For a generation, Alan M. Wald's The New York Intellectuals has stood as the authoritative account of an often misunderstood chapter in the history of a celebrated tradition among literary radicals in the United States. With a new introduction by the author, this anniversary edition shows that the trajectory and ideological ordeals of the New York intellectual Left still matters today.

From the instant that the US journalist John Reed witnessed the \"Ten Days that Shook the World\" in the fall of 1917, ideas and images of the Russian Revolution began to resonate across the world. The event had an electrifying nearreligious import for all varieties of radicals as a beacon of justice signaling that hierarchies were to be leveled on behalf of a liberated, unified humanity. What had been done and was being said in Red Russia were embraced and interpreted by activists and cultural workers as the opening of a new horizon; soon Bolshevik politics and the avant-garde art of the revolution commenced to intertwine with the national experiences and local struggles of many societies. One hundred years later, people are still wrestling with the ways in which the event of the Bolshevik Revolution launched Communist-led political and cultural movements that generated myriad progeny. This post-revolution tradition is at this point a long-term, hybrid legacy, conditioned by organized, material underpinnings and what started as a relatively homogeneous ideological universe; the methods of observation and inference required to engage such a slow process evoke the need for an analytical category close to that of a longue durée.

Aaron Kramer was the most prolific poet to emerge from the U. S. Communist movement in the mid-20th century, his earliest collections issued by International Publishers. In his last decades, he was chiefly known as a skilled and reliable contributor of verse, essays, and translations from the Yiddish to progressive Jewish magazines such as Jewish Currents and Outlook. Yet all efforts to revive his reputation through conventional means, including the publication of a major collection and appreciation in 2004, have been singularly unsuccessful. What might be gained through a deeper contextualization of his work, an attempt to inhabit his life as it played out in the changing contexts and fortunes of the left? Kramer was a minor poet, but there is still much to be valued by assessing him as the widower of a lost Communist faith who never truly remarried, an artist haunted by dreams murdered by Hitler and Stalin.

The 1930s radicalization of American intellectuals was adumbrated and anticipated in the late 19208. Its matrix was a growing disillusionment with what Elliot Cohen referred to in an essay as the Jazz “Age of Brass.”² Underlying political discontent was dramatically manifested by the fervent involvement of John Dos Passos and other writers in the Sacco-Vanzetti defense campaign. This preparatory process was, of course, reflected as well in the pages of theMenorah Journal, guided by Cohen, whose broad cultural outlook served as a natural gateway to social consciousness and political radicalism, even before Cohen and the members of his circle

A substantial number of studies have been devoted to probing the social and historical roots of modern Jewish radicalism. Despite the variety of conclusions such studies have yielded, most analyses usually begin by noting the dilemma of young Jewish intellectuals who have attempted to escape the confines of the religio-cultural ghetto, only to confront an alien society toward which they feel ambivalent if not hostile.² Political radicalism with its internationalist elan has often served as a magnetic pole of attraction to such intellectuals, especially in a period of social upheaval. One of the most important yet least documented developments in