Barbara Foley
In the context of US literary history, the term “proletarian novel” is most applicable to a grouping of approximately one hundred novels that were produced during the years 1929–1941. Since the genre was explicitly identified with leftist politics during the Cold War and for several decades beyond, the proletarian novel was dismissed as aesthetically bankrupt and relegated to the dustbin of literary history. But the proletarian novel has always resisted being pigeon‐holed, either temporally or politically: it emerged from prior traditions of literary radicalism and has continued to be present, if in altered form, in present‐day literary production. Given the resurgence of critiques of capitalism in both mainstream and scholarly discourses, moreover, as well as broadened conceptions of what counts as the “proletariat,” there promises to be both a revival of interest in 1930s literary radicalism and increasing encouragement of novelists articulating class‐conscious commentaries on the causes and consequences of social inequality.
The emergence of the proletarian novel of the 1930s is inseparable from three interrelated extra‐literary developments: the political and economic crisis of the Depression; the emergence of Soviet socialism and its far‐flung challenge to capitalism; and the growth of the American Communist Party (CPUSA), which exercised widespread influence upon writers, first through the John Reed Clubs and subsequently through the American Writers Congress gatherings sponsored by the League of American Writers. It is important to be aware, however, of predecessor literary texts and schools, sometimes explicitly invoked by proletarian novelists, that enabled this literary genre to emerge. Slave narratives, which exhibit similar concerns with oppression and resistance, characteristically featured first‐person narrators whose emotional and political development anticipates the class‐conscious maturation of proletarian protagonists. Many texts routinely grouped under the rubric of naturalism – such as Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), Hamlin Garland’s Main‐Travelled Roads (1891), and Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899) – grounded much of their pessimistic determinism in an analysis of the roots of poverty in the capitalist class system. Political utopias and dystopias – presented most famously in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888) and Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1907) – raised the mirage of a socialist future, in addition to the tragic cost of its non‐realization, well before the 1930s. Early twentieth‐century socialist novels – Ernest Poole’s The Harbor (1915) and, most famously, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) – placed the class struggle front and center in their treatments of urban industrialism. The International Socialist Review (1900–1918) and the Masses (1911–1917) provided forums for class‐conscious literature and anti‐capitalist cultural critique.
The radical upsurge of 1919 quickened the political consciousness of many 1920s writers. Journals such as the Liberator (1918–1924) and its successor, the Workers Monthly (1924–1927), continued the work of the Masses. The principal organs of African American radicalism, the Messenger (1917–1928) and the Crusader (1918–1922), defined the postwar New Negro as both a cultural radical and a social revolutionary. Such novels as Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922) and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), while focused more on satire and psychology than class struggle, stressed capitalist commodification as the root cause of their protagonists’ alienation. Novels about immigrant experience – Samuel Ornitz’s Haunch, Paunch, and Jowl (1923) and Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1925) – injected a searing skepticism into their tales of the pursuit of the American Dream. Many novels routinely associated with the Harlem Renaissance – Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter (1930), Claude McKay’s Banjo (1929), and even Jean Toomer’s highly experimental Cane (1923), often seen as the Renaissance’s founding text – contain hard‐hitting indictments of racial violence and class hierarchy. As the decade progressed, writers and intellectuals became increasingly aware of the harsh conditions experienced by the working class, for whom there had been no Roaring Twenties. The execution of the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1927 galvanized the radicalism of many writers, not least among these John Dos Passos, who would emerge as, arguably, the most important practitioner of the proletarian novel.
To point up such continuities with past texts and traditions is not to engage in an obligatory nod to literary history; nor is it to query the usefulness of viewing the proletarian novel as a distinct genre that came to fruition in a distinct period. It is simply to remind us that the proletarian novel cannot be placed in a temporal ghetto. Categories such as “naturalism” and “Harlem Renaissance,” while useful for some purposes, displace economic and political concerns and set arbitrary temporal boundaries, thereby obscuring the “red thread” running through much US literary history – a point that would be stressed by the proletarian literary theorist Granville Hicks in his 1933 revisionary literary history, The Great Tradition (1934). It is evident, moreover, that some proletarian novelists saw their projects as explicitly aligned with these precedent texts and traditions. Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder (1936) is based upon the slave narrative archive at Fisk University; Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) is modeled upon Dreiser’s tale of crime and punishment in An American Tragedy (1925); Mike Gold’s Jews without Money (1930) invokes both The Jungle and Haunch, Paunch, and Jowl.
Although in retrospect the proletarian novel constitutes a genre possessing substantial coherence, its key concerns were subjected to debate and underwent development even during the decade of its heyday. Starting in the late 1920s and gathering momentum by 1932, discussions in the principal leftist cultural organ, the New Masses, queried the parameters of the genre. What was the difference between a proletarian novel, a radical novel, and a revolutionary novel? Did the term “proletarian novel” signify authorship, readership, subject matter, or political perspective? Although the quintessential proletarian novel was envisioned as embodying all four of these criteria of differentiation, the operational definition generally settled upon by the mid‐1930s was that the proletarian novel described the lives of working‐class people from an anti‐capitalist perspective, one that was intended to arouse militant – at times revolutionary – class consciousness in the text’s readers. After 1936, when anti‐fascism superseded revolutionary class struggle among the communists’ strategic priorities, the term “proletarian novel” virtually disappeared from the New Masses, the Partisan Review, and other journals of the left. It was during the latter half of the decade, however, that the most complex and accomplished proletarian novels emerged, indicating that the challenge of creating effective class‐conscious fictional narratives continued to inspire writers throughout the decade.
From the outset, the proletarian novel was significantly influenced by international cultural developments, particularly in the Soviet Union. Gold’s 1921 Liberator essay, “Toward Proletarian Art,” called upon American artists and writers to produce their own version of the Proletkult movement emerging in the young Soviet Union. Discussions among the theorists in RAPP, a late 1920s Soviet writers’ group – particularly with regard to encouraging working‐class authorship and documentary writing – were reproduced in the pages of the New Masses. Walt Carmon and later Joshua Kunitz were commissioned with the task of keeping US literary radicals abreast of Soviet developments. A number of US writers contributed to International Literature, the journal of the Comintern‐sponsored International Union of Revolutionary Writers. But US proletarian writers have been unjustly lambasted for subservience to “directives” issued from the USSR. The recommendations of the 1930s Kharkov conference were duly noted and then largely ignored. “Socialist realism,” which in the early 1930s supplanted the call for proletarian literature in the USSR, never caught on among the Americans. Articles by such luminaries as Anatoli Lunacharsky, Maxim Gorky, and Georg Lukács appeared in US left journals throughout the 1930s, but evidently carried less weight than statements by such prominent Americans as Gold, Hicks, and Joseph Freeman (Murphy 1991). The program outlined in the 1935 anthology Proletarian Literature in the United States was a pure product of America.
Although the standard Cold War account of 1930s literary radicalism would dismiss proletarian novelists as practitioners of a plodding realism, impervious to the subtleties of modernism, in fact the 1930s writers evinced a high regard for literary experimentation. Even those proletarian novelists who opted for conventionally realistic narrative modes were often compelled to draw upon a range of new literary devices to expand their texts’ rhetorical range. When they failed to embody left politics in familiar narrative conventions, their critics were often exacting. Many on the literary left, critics and novelists alike, exhibited great interest in utilizing experimental novelistic forms to articulate a leftist politics; Clara Weatherwax’s Marching! Marching! (1935), a novel making use of multiple points of view and collective stream of consciousness, was the winner of the 1935 New Masses contest for the best proletarian novel of the year. Writers and critics on the left may not have generally admired T.S. Eliot, whom they dismissed as a reactionary aesthete, but they had a complex relationship with such writers as Marcel Proust and James Joyce, and they often spoke of their own project as “modern” in terms compatible with Ezra Pound’s call to “make it new.” The post‐World War II equation of modernism with a politically quietistic high modernism, itself a product of the Cold War consensus, was alien to the proletarian literary radicals.
If US proletarian writers were neither taking orders from Moscow nor handing over modernism to advocates of art‐for‐art’s‐sake, neither were they, as a group, as “left” as has often been supposed. Most of the literary proletarians repudiated the view that art should be propaganda. Although there was a certain amount of talk about literature as a weapon in the class struggle, a close scrutiny of debates over literature and politics carried in the pages of New Masses, Partisan Review, and the organs of John Reed Clubs reveals that, if anything, many on the US literary left endorsed a cognitivist as opposed to an agitational aesthetic. Many left‐wing writers and critics felt uneasy with didacticism and preferred literary strategies that seamlessly conjoined politics with narrative; a discourse involving terms like “weaving,” “blending,” and “merging” dominated in discussions of novelistic aesthetics. To a degree, of course, such complaints were directed at plain old clumsy writing. But they also evinced a widespread and for the most part uninterrogated acceptance of the mainstream aesthetic premise – inherited from Percy Lubbock and Henry James, and preached in creative writing courses to this day – that a text should show, not tell.
Although aesthetic principles cannot be traced back to political programs without going through multiple mediations, the literary left’s embrace of a conventional aesthetic program is provocatively linked with various reformist tendencies in the broad political program and outlook of the CPUSA. Even at the height of its radicalism – as expressed in William Z. Foster’s Toward Soviet America (Foster 1932) – the CPUSA sent out contradictory signals about the relationship of reform to revolution, of electoral politics and American “democratic” traditions to revolutionary proletarian internationalism. While these tendencies increasingly prevailed during the Popular Front era, they had been present from the forming of the CPUSA in 1919. One can speculatively connect premises about politics with premises about form: just as leftist organizers should not talk too insistently about revolution, bringing in communist ideas “from the outside” in the Leninist sense, so should literary texts not too insistently jar their readers with political analyses – conveyed through speeches, mentor characters, or even narratorial voice – coming “from outside” the experiences of literary characters. Even though the literary radicals – like 1930s Marxists generally – called for the “better world” of classless egalitarianism, at times they were hesitant about how best to do so in practice.
Two other features of contemporaneous leftist doctrine and practice are relevant to a consideration of proletarian fiction. Critics of the left, then and now, frequently charge that Marxism, in both theory and practice, precludes appreciation of the special oppression of women and people of color. The record of the 1930s left with regard to both issues – the “Woman Question” and the “Negro Question,” in the terms of the day – is somewhat mixed. Left‐wing iconography often gendered the proletariat as muscularly masculine; communist doctrine inadequately theorized the unpaid labor of women in the home. There was a “women’s page” in the New Masses that featured recipes, along with discussions of childrearing and husband‐handling. Yet in both the New Masses and party organs specifically directed to women, such as Working Woman, women’s participation in the class struggle was emphasized; birth control and abortion rights were promoted; and the altered gender relations in the USSR – complete with the abolition of formal marriage – were often highly praised.
With regard to anti‐racist struggle, the CPUSA’s record is less ambiguous; without doubt the party was the leading anti‐racist force in the United States during the 1930s. The vigorous campaigns against lynching and Jim Crow and supporting sharecropper unions were widely publicized, as was the struggle against “white chauvinism” in the ranks of the party itself, epitomized in the 1931 intra‐party “trial” of Harlem janitor August Yokinen. In the early 1930s, communist‐led protests against evictions – such as the one described in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) – established the party’s urban anti‐racist credentials (Hudson 1991; Kelley 1990). The largely party‐led National Negro Congress addressed issues ranging from industrial organizing to police brutality to demands for relief; the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) put multiracial unionism on the map. The call for class‐based multiracial unity – “black and white unite and fight” – existed for many years in contradictory coexistence with the call for Negro self‐determination in the South’s Black Belt. Although the CPUSA continually reviled what it called “narrow nationalism,” it advocated the fostering of “the national consciousness of the Negro people”’ and acknowledged that the future “Soviet America” in the Black Belt, however transitional, would be not socialist but “democratic.” The ambiguous relationship between Negro nationalism and proletarian interracialism in communist theory and practice would at once spur activism and sow confusion, both in political organizing and in the proletarian literary texts representing the imbrication of race in US class struggles.
Scholarly discussions of proletarian fiction have frequently deployed a taxonomy based upon the range of subject matters covered in the genre. Proletarian novels generally fall into five thematic categories; needless to say, any given text can straddle several categories:
Although a taxonomy based upon subject matter enables us to map out the thematic concerns embedded in proletarian novels, our understanding of the ways in which radical writers met the challenge of working left‐wing policies into fictional form is better enhanced if we consider subgenres based not upon topic but instead upon narrative strategy. Granville Hicks, in an influential 1934 New Masses series titled “Revolution and the Novel,” proposed a formally based taxonomy that provides the scaffolding for such an investigation. Somewhat revising Hicks’s categories, we can designate fictional autobiographies, bildungsromane, multi‐protagonist social novels, and collective novels. The fictional autobiography features a first‐person working‐class narrator‐hero who, in the course of the tale, comes to a class‐conscious understanding of the forces that have shaped her or his life. Thus, Mike Gold’s Jews without Money – which consists of about 85% autobiography, according to its author – depicts the coming of age of a young Jewish‐American communist on New York’s Lower East Side. The closing epiphany – only on the text’s somewhat notorious last page does Gold’s Mikey hear the revolutionary soapbox speech that changes his life – is largely validated by the reader’s awareness of the close convergence of experiencing character with narrator and author. In Daughter of Earth, Agnes Smedley’s portrayal of the internal struggles experienced by her protagonist, “Marie Rogers,” combining Marxist social analysis with psychoanalytic probing of subjectivity, is reinforced by the text’s felt autobiographical presence. In Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited, Larry Donovan’s decision to abandon the route of petit bourgeois escapism and accept his place in the muck and mire of proletarian life is buttressed by the experientially based realism with which his work experiences are described (Wixson 1994). In all these fictional autobiographies, the gaining of mature selfhood is portrayed as inseparable from the acquisition of class consciousness. And while the genre’s stress upon authenticity runs the risk of a certain economistic workerism, these texts’ representations of proletarian self‐actualization provide reading that is compelling to this day.
The proletarian bildungsroman (the novel of individual development) also focuses on a single protagonist, but in a patently fictional way: this is the most conventionally novelistic of the modes of the proletarian novel. Often depicting the transformation of false consciousness into class consciousness, this genre ordinarily deploys omniscient narration and an array of minor characters representing a range of political potentialities and stances. Thus, Myra Page’s account of Andy’s politicization in Moscow Yankee – his gradual alignment with a new social order struggling to come into being – is linked with his growing love for an emancipated “new Soviet woman.” A production plot, focused on the effort to maximize output while democratizing the division of labor, parallels the love plot. Grace Lumpkin’s Gastonia strike novel To Make My Bread, which is loosely based on the life of the martyred Wiggins, depicts the emergence of proletarian consciousness in Bonnie McClure, a woman descending from the mountains to the factory. Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl portrays an anonymous young Minnesotan waitress whose preparations for out‐of‐wedlock motherhood are simultaneously preparations for class warfare. Guy Endore’s Babouk relates the dialectical transformation of African tribal collectivity into a steely resolve to murder the oppressor: Babouk’s own internal contradictions mirror the course of historical necessity.
These and other proletarian bildungsromane vary in the degree to which they restrict the reader to the parameters of the protagonist’s awareness. Page’s novel, as it approaches closure, relies excessively upon its conventional love story to paper over contradictions in its treatment of politics and economics. Lumpkin’s novel rarely exposes the reader to any knowledge or voices to which Bonnie is not privy; anti‐capitalism is implied on every page, but revolutionary politics is virtually absent, except through a vaguely leftist mentor character appearing briefly at the end. Le Sueur’s text, with its nearly inarticulate protagonist and its conjoining of childbearing with changing the world, runs the risk of biologizing and restricting to women the development of class consciousness. Endore’s novel, by contrast, continually inserts historical information about the twentieth century into his narrative of the Haitian Revolution, thus hectoring the reader into seeing the present‐day implications of that revolution.
Wright’s Native Son exhibits some of the inventive techniques that could be deployed by a writer using a conventional novelistic single‐protagonist form to project a radical political understanding. In this novel Wright was faced with a near‐insuperable challenge: how to depict the grounding of Bigger Thomas’s consciousness and actions in an analysis of capitalist social relations while keeping the reader centered on Bigger’s thoughts, even as Bigger is shown to have only the most limited understanding of the forces that have shaped him. This challenge is compounded by the felt necessity – central to CPUSA’s line on the “Negro Question,” and elaborated by Wright in his New Challenge essay, “A Blueprint for Negro Writing” (1937) – for African American writers to “accept the nationalist implications of their lives, not in order to encourage them, but in order to transcend them” (Wright 1978: 40). This feat is achieved in part by Wright’s presentation of contradictions within Bigger’s crude black nationalism, which runs from approval of Hitler to an inchoate desire for oneness with other denizens of the urban Black Belt. The material basis of Bigger’s limited conceptual range is supplied by such devices as newspaper headlines describing Bigger in bestial terms and overheard conversations revealing the similarly restricted consciousness of other African Americans of Chicago’s South Side. The long speech by the Communist Party lawyer Boris Max – which is much more analytical than its structural counterpart in the trial scene in Dreiser’s An American Tragedy – clarifies the thesis that Bigger is part of a “nation within a nation.” In his Jamesian prefatory essay “How Bigger Was Born,” Wright notes the many models for Bigger in the Jim Crow South but then – comparing Bigger’s alienation to that of Lenin and Trotsky observing the Houses of Parliament – observes that there are “millions” of Bigger Thomases, and that many of them are white. The effect of this multilayered mode of representation is to limn the logic whereby black nationalism is to be accepted and then transcended. Bigger does not need to be portrayed as grasping Marxist politics (“What I killed for, I am,” he famously insists at his end) in order for the reader to trace the dots connecting race with class (Wright 1993: 446, 429).
Intuiting the potential pitfalls accompanying the reliance upon a single protagonist to bear the burden of political education, many proletarian writers opted to abandon altogether the single‐protagonist format and to explore the possibilities of the multi‐protagonist social novel, that is, a conventionally realistic text in which a cast of characters embody multiple class and ideological positions. In Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder, a range of characters, black and white, not only display varying degrees of courage and fear but also expose the reader to a philosophical debate about the “Rights of Man” beyond the range of Gabriel Prosser himself. The continuing relevance of this debate to mid‐1930s anti‐racist movements is subtly implied. Robert Cantwell’s The Land of Plenty uses the occasion of the lumber workers’ strike to explore the potentiality for self‐rule in the group of workers who make the mill function. It is thus also a novel about the possible seeds of communism in the capitalist present. William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge treats the Moss brothers, a tripartite protagonist whose conflicts, among themselves and with their environment, embody the principal contradictions within the emerging black proletariat. While Attaway’s novel can still be faulted for restricting the reader to the confines of the characters’ awareness – a flaw that Ralph Ellison in his 1941 New Masses critique attributed to Attaway’s incomplete grasp of Marxist dialectics (Ellison 1941) – as a multi‐protagonist social novel it bypasses many of the individualistic limitations of the bildungsroman and proves a useful vehicle for representing the tragic outcome of the 1919 steel strike.
Perhaps the most successful – certainly the most inventive – mode of 1930s proletarian fiction is the collective novel. Similar to the social novel in its portrayal of a broad range of social types, the collective novel goes further by unabashedly taking a whole society as its protagonist. In creating this expanded sense of collectivity, sometimes the text breaks down the notion of “character” as such, creating a group consciousness in which individual voices become indistinguishable. In Clara Weatherwax’s prize‐winning novel about striking lumber workers, the workers’ meditations about how to respond to a fellow worker’s on‐the‐job death are rendered as a kind of collective murmur. At times the collective novel features fictional characters who never meet: in Josephine Herbst’s Rope of Gold, the left‐wing journalist Victoria Chance and the union organizer Steve Carson never cross paths. Clearly readers must figure out for themselves why these characters inhabit the same volume: active engagement of the reader in the process of comprehending – and hence shaping – the total social structure is a vital component of many collective novels. Sometimes the text abruptly shifts registers, moving from the fictional lives of individuals to narratorial proclamations about politics and history: the famous inter‐chapters in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which eloquently announce the movement from “I” to “we,” constitute a formal culmination of earlier experiments with the collective novel. Still another technique used by collective novelists is the introduction of documentary materials – headlines, leaflets, songs – requiring the reader to separate the wheat from the chaff and to contemplate the construction of historical discourse itself as arena of class struggle. Although this device is also used in the proletarian bildungsroman – as in Native Son – its deployment in the collective novel often plays a more significant role, for it figures centrally in the text’s interrogation of the relationship between language and ideology. And where the multi‐protagonist social novel routinely relies upon conventions of narrative transparency to project its conception of the social order, the collective novel frequently engages in what might be called “critical totalization.” Even as they are invited to connect the dots that limn the social totality, readers are made aware that the nature of that totality is itself a matter of political contestation.
The writer who most fully explored the potentialities of the collective novel – indeed, whose name is often associated with its origination and development – is Dos Passos, whose U.S.A. trilogy represents the culmination of attempts to fuse novelistic experimentation with anti‐capitalist critique. Drawing upon an ecumenical political leftism and written in a kaleidoscopic style drawing upon futurism, cubism, and cinematic montage, the novels of the trilogy provide a trenchant account of politics, economics, and daily life in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The 42nd Parallel covers approximately 1900–1916; 1919 focuses on the war years, 1917–1919; The Big Money covers 1920–1928, with provocative nods toward the 1929 stock market crash and the Depression. Each novel consists of four types of interspersed materials: fictional narratives, biographies, Newsreels, and Camera Eyes. The fictional narratives treat a range of characters – from blue‐collar workers to media moguls, left‐wing organizers to Hollywood starlets – whose lives embody in microcosm the effects of ideological obfuscation, sexual commodification, the lure of the “big money,” and, occasionally, radical politics upon a range of representative Americans. The biographies are prose poem jeremiads, alternately ironic and eloquent, depicting key figures who, for better or worse, shaped culture, technology, and politics in the early twentieth century. The Newsreels consist of one‐ to three‐page clumps of newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, fragments of speeches, and snatches of popular songs. The Camera Eye passages, written in a stream‐of‐consciousness style reminiscent of James Joyce, are musings representing Dos Passos’s own gradual growth, starting in childhood, into the author of the text. Toward the end of The Big Money, he concludes, “all right we are two nations” (Dos Passos 1937: 462).
Dos Passos always maintained some distance from the left – even when writing 1919 – and the doctrinal politics guiding much of U.S.A. invite leftist critique. His “representative” range of characters contains not one non‐white, and those African American, Asian, and Hispanic characters making brief appearances conform to derogatory racial stereotypes. Although he ably targets the capitalist social relations that warp gender identities, most of Dos Passos’s female characters evince even less agency than the males (for an alternative view, see Casey 1998). Dos Passos’s portraits of leftist organizers and activists are often cynical and, especially in The Big Money, express his growing affinity for caricaturing communists as authoritarian hatchet men. Even at his most impassioned, moreover, Dos Passos voices disappointment that the nation has been taken over and betrayed, more than commitment to abolishing the class system he has so brilliantly anatomized. The political assumptions and assertions embedded in U.S.A. hardly represent the most radical thinking among proletarian novelists. Nonetheless, in its dialectical and totalizing grasp of American history, as well as its acute awareness of the hegemonic and counter‐hegemonic roles language necessarily plays in narrating that history, the U.S.A. trilogy represents one of the high marks of US literary radicalism and supplies the basis for Jean‐Paul Sartre’s 1938 judgment that Dos Passos was “the greatest writer” of his time (Sartre 2010).
While clearly not all fiction writers of the 1930s participated in the project of the proletarian novel, it is a testament to the influence of the genre that various authors not aligned with literary radicalism can be read as reacting to its themes and conventions. Nathanael West’s A Cool Million (1934), primarily a parody of Horatio Alger narratives, treats its hapless hero, Lemuel Pitkin, as a quintessential non‐class‐conscious protagonist. His literal dismemberment – he gradually loses various limbs and organs in the course of the narrative – is a surreal play upon the conventions of the “bottom dogs” proletarian novel. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) contains, among other things, a folkish challenge to proletarianism. The sequence in which Janie Crawford and Tea Cake Woods enjoy their labor on the muck, reveling in the music of their Bahamian fellow laborers, contains an implicit refutation of the emphasis upon exploitation and suffering in contemporaneous proletarian fiction. William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) can be read as a non‐ (or even anti‐) Marxist reworking of proletarian themes: the Depression‐linked peripatetic existences of both Joe Christmas and Lena Grove are recast in archetypal terms, even as the abolitionist‐descended Joanna Burden is suggestively linked with Scottsboro’s outside agitators (Meyerson and Neilson 2008). The chapters in Absalom, Absalom! (1936) portraying Thomas Sutpen’s descent from the hills into the slave‐based plantation economy of the plain, while resonant of classical tragedy, acknowledge the power of a Marxist modes‐of‐production narrative. Even writers who stayed away from the American Writers Congresses were affected by the radicalism of the decade and, in particular, by the model of the proletarian novel, which they might reject but found difficult to ignore.
Finally, it bears noting that the genre of the proletarian novel did not simply disappear in the years following World War II. Early novels of the Cold War, such as Chester Himes’s Lonely Crusade (1947) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), bear many embedded traces of the communist experience that they repudiate (Foley 2010). Alexander Saxton’s The Great Midland (1948) goes against the flow with its abidingly sympathetic portrait of a communist union organizer; Howard Fast emerged in the postwar years as the source of a steady stream of novels examining the red line of history; Lloyd Brown (Iron City [1953]), Harriette Arnow (The Dollmaker [1954]), and Truman Nelson (The Surveyor [1960]) published left‐wing novels during the height of McCarthyism (Wald 2014; Washington 2014). Pressures of the Cold War led many left‐wing novelists to turn to science fiction: Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, in The Space Merchants (1952), were early practitioners of a radical futurism that would continue in the works of Kim Stanley Robinson (the Mars trilogy [1993, 1994, 1995]), Marge Piercy (Woman on the Edge of Time [1976]), and Octavia Butler (The Parable of the Sower [1993] and The Parable of the Talents [1998]). Novels by Margaret Walker (Jubilee [1966]), Louise Meriwether (Daddy Was a Number Runner [1970]), Julian Mayfield (The Grand Parade [1961]), and John Oliver Killens (Youngblood [1982]) examined African American experience from a highly class‐conscious perspective (Wald 2007). Novels focusing on labor conflicts and strikes (John Nichols’s The Milagro Beanfield War [1976], Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven [1987], and Thomas McGrath’s This Coffin Has No Handles [1988]), as well as Tim Sheard’s series of detective novels featuring a communist hospital worker named Lenny Moss (the most recent being One Foot in the Grave [2019]), have continued to emphasize the class struggle. Such writers as E.L. Doctorow (Ragtime [1975]), Dorothy Allison (Bastard Out of Carolina [1992]), Leslie Feinberg (Stone Butch Blues [1993]), Barbara Kingsolver (Flight Behavior [2012]), Russell Banks (Continental Drift [1985] and Affliction [1989]), Steve Yarbrough (The Oxygen Man [1999]), and Helena Maria Viramontes (Under the Feet of Jesus [1994]) have devised a range of imaginative means for exploring anti‐capitalist concerns, often in conjunction with a heightened awareness of the connections between and among gender‐, sexuality‐, and race‐based oppressions, environmental devastation, and class exploitation.
It will be interesting to see what kinds of novels that can be adjudged “proletarian” will emerge from the present class configuration in the United States. As of this writing in 2019, there is mounting concern with inequality, even as its causes in capitalist social relations remain as mystified as ever. In the United States and elsewhere, racist and anti‐immigrant movements that scapegoat the darker‐skinned sectors of world’s working class have gained traction. Among progressive‐minded people, identity‐based and intersectional politics challenge the analytical centrality of a Marxist class analysis of exploitation; radical writers thus face the urgency of nurturing class consciousness at a time when leftist movements are largely in retreat. Yet we can anticipate that, as long as the capitalist system continues to generate contradiction and conflict, novelists will continue to produce texts that can – through a continual reconfiguring and updating of the category – be termed “proletarian.”
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 7 (MODERNISM AND THE AMERICAN NOVEL); CHAPTER 10 (THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE AND THE NEW NEGRO).