The radical novel reconsidered

When Tucker's People was published in 1943 it was praised by the New York Times for its "blowtorch intensity.". The idea for Tucker's People stemmed from Ira Wolfert's coverage as a reporter of the trial of James "Jimmy" Hines, a Tammany Hall district leader who was prosecuted by Thomas E. Dewey for letting Dutch Schultz take over the numbers game in New York. It is "a penetrating, sympathetic novel of frustration and insecurity, a story of little people, many of them decent people, battling against forces they are too feeble to resist and too simple to understand," according to the Saturday Review of Literature.

A story of the industrialization of the South, To Make My Bread revolves around a family of Appalachian mountaineers - small farmers, hunters, and moonshiners - driven by economic conditions to the milltown and transformed into millhands, strikers, and rebels against the established order. Recognized as one of the major works on the Gastonia textile strike, Grace Lumpkin's novel is important for anyone interested in cultural or feminist history as it deals with early generations of women radicals committed to addressing the difficult connections of class and race. Suzanne Sowinska's introduction looks at Lumpkin's volatile career and this book's critical reception.

"Set in St. Louis, A World to Win centers on two half brothers, Leo and Robert Hurley. Leo is an unlikely proletarian hero who acquires political consciousness in spite of himself; Robert is a victim of his own confused literary pretensions. As they grope toward reconciliation, they come into contact with bohemians and radicals who engaged in labor activism during the Popular Front era.". "An important milepost in the development of worker-writing, A World to Win steers readers away from a sentimentalized concern for the poor to a more concrete contemplation of the social and political conditions that characterize their lives."--BOOK JACKET.

"I'd rather fail in story writing than succeed in anything else," Josephine Herbst declared in 1913. The Iowa native's Trexler family trilogy, with Pity Is Not Enough as its first volume, shows clearly that Herbst in fact succeeded at story-telling. In this novel Herbst draws loosely on her family history, using Reconstruction's demise in Georgia to link the advance of free market capitalism to the North's abandonment of its commitment to racial justice. The protagonists - Catherine Trexler and her brother Joe, a carpetbagger embroiled in railroad scandals - are ripped apart financially and psychologically by competing codes of domesticity, Southern manners, and capitalism. In her introduction to the book, Mary Ann Rasmussen argues that Herbst was unlike many other 1930s leftists in that she refused the "essentialist notions of gender difference that confounded radical men and women of her generation."

Salome of the Tenements shocked many critics and writers when first published in 1923, but its author was immediately hailed as a major new talent. A love story of a working-class Salome and her "highborn" John the Baptist, the novel is based on the real-life story of Jewish immigrant Rose Pastor's fairytale romance with the millionaire socialist Graham Stokes. It also reflects Yezierska's own aborted romance with the famous educator John Dewey. Yezierska's passionate but cynical novel poses oppositions such as cultural type/stereotype, passion/reason, and ethnic identity/assimilation, and it resonates powerfully to the contemporary reader.