Alan Wald

From Margin to Center

Review of C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary by Paul Buhle. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left

Wald offers a comprehensive history and reconsideration of the U.S. literary left in the mid-twentieth century. Recovering the central role Marxist-influenced writers played in fiction, poetry, theater, and literary criticism, he explores the lives and work of figures including Richard Wright, Muriel Rukeyser, Mike Gold, Claude McKay, Tillie Olsen, and Meridel Le Sueur.

The Subaltern Speaks

Review of Babouk by Guy Endore. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Learning from Labor

Review of Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s by George Lipsitz.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Irving Howe and the Critics: Celebrations and Attacks; Politics and the Intellectual: Conversations with Irving Howe; The Worlds of Irving Howe: The Critical Legacy

enormous amount of excellent scholarship produced even as the field underwent its ostensible decline. The individuals involved in high-profile Sovietology represented only a small segment of the field as a whole. Most scholars steered clear of the fireworks and focused on fundamental scholarship. This is the work that has stood the test of time. Second, the end of the Cold War, far from sparking an implosion, has had a liberating effect in many of the fields of Russian studies. To be sure, political science has diminished in importance as rational choice theory has taken precedence over cultural specificity. But history, literary studies, religious studies, art history and anthropology have thrived since the 1990s. Not only has the opening of the Soviet archives brought a veritable bonanza for researchers, which continues to this day despite reimposed restrictions, but new questions, methods and topics can be engaged that would have been unthinkable in the bitter ideological atmosphere of the Cold War. Today’s scholars of the former Soviet Union may have little to say to Mars, but Minerva is so much the wiser.

Between Marxism and Pragmatism

Review of Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist by Christopher Phelps.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Anti-Racist Imagination

Review of The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America by Alexander Saxton. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.