Alan M. Wald

"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). Confronting 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."--Publisher's description. "Wald relies on original archival research and interviews to forge a dramatic narrative of the cultural Left from innovative perspectives. He presents a cross section of literary talent, from the famous to the forgotten, the major to the minor. Basing his assessments on the dexterity with which writings conveyed the emotional terrain of antifascist struggle and its legacy, Wald examines the work of writers such as Len Zinberg (a.k.a. Ed Lacy), John Oliver Killens, Irwin Shaw, Albert Maltz, Ann Petry, Chester Himes, Henry Roth, Lauren Filfillan, Ruth McKenney, Morris U. Schappes, and Jo Sinclair. The book culminates in Wald's exploration of the previously unknown writings of playwright Arthur Miller in the Communist press."--From the dust-jacket front flap.

The essays in this volume deal with various aspects of the history of the revolutionary socialist current in United States that came to be identified as "American Trotskyism. " One of the most dynamic currents in the U.S. Left from the late 1920s to the 1980s, deeply committed to working-class democracy and internationalism, it had an intellectual and political impact well beyond the number of its members. The essays offer the most definitive history of that movement to be produced so far, giving a sense of some of its most colorful personalities and outstanding achievements - as well as it serious limitations. This work is an essential starting point, offering an ample bibliography for those who wish to carry out further research. More than this, the authors develop interpretations that confront the meaning of revolutionary politics in the United States, as they relate the efforts of the Trotskyists to the broader developments of the twentieth century.

Wald wirtes of the group's efforts in the 1930s to build a Marxist alternative to the official Communist movement and the aftermath of that in the post war intellectual world.

"John Wheelwright (c.1592?1679), was a Puritan clergyman in England and America, and was most noted for being banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the Antinomian Controversy, and for subsequently establishing the town of Exeter, New Hampshire."--Wikipedia.

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 suggestive of the "negative dialectics" of Theodor Adorno than the traditional social realism of the Left. Establishing new points of contact among Kenneth Fearing, Ann Petry, Alexander Saxton, Richard Wright, Jo Sinclair, Thomas McGrath, and Carlos Bulosan, Wald argues that these writers were in dialogue with psychoanalysis, existentialism, and postwar modernism, often generating moods of piercing emotional acuity and cosmic dissent. He also recounts the contributions of lesser known cultural workers, with a unique accent on gays and lesbians, secular Jews, and people of color. The vexing ambiguities of an era Wald labels "late antifascism" serve to frame an impressive collective biography.