Exiles from a Future Time The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left
Contents
Preface
A Note on the Terminology and Illustrations
Introduction: Strange Communists I Have Known
Chapter 1. American Jeremiad
Recording Angel
Shakespeare in Overalls
Poems for Workers
“Write It Plain”
Revolutionary Romanticism
Chapter 2. Inventing Mike Gold
“A Kind of Cheeky Krazy Kat”
“By Street Life and Thunder”
Poverty Is a Trap
Meyerhold in Harlem
The Van Gogh of a Darker Time
The Gold Standard
Chapter 3. The Great Promise
Living in a “State of Emergency”
“Waiting for Trachty”
The Black Cultural Front
African Americans and the John Reed Clubs
Gender and Party Commitment
Chapter 4. The New Masses and the Social Muse
“Bloody Anarchists”
Becoming a Weekly
Portrait of a New Masses Literary Editor
Poetry and the Popular Front
The Last Refuge
Chapter 5. Yogis and Commissars
Love and Revolution
A Pen Dripped in Vitriol
The St. Augustine of Communism
The Red Valentino
A Divided Life
The Dream with the Changing Name
Chapter 6. Three Moderns in Search of an Answer
The Modernist Temptation
Bastard in the Ragged Suit
Apollinaire of the Proletariat
Byron of the Poolhalls
Chapter 7. Sappho in Red
Loyalties
The Rational Ecologist
Waltzing Mouse
And God Came In
The Apostate
The Premature Socialist-Feminists
Chapter 8. Black Marxists in White America
Transcending Narrow Nationalisms
New Challenges
“New” and “Newer” Negroes
Between Class and Nationality
From Banjo to Melody
Conclusion: The Antinomies of a Proletarian Avant-garde
Flights and Moorings
A Social Poet’s Progress
Poets and Criminals
Chronology of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Cultural Left
Notes
Acknowledgments and Sources
Index