Granville Hicks (Critical Perspectives On The P) - Hardcover

Levenson, Leah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1566391040 ISBN 13: 9781566391047

Publisher: Temple University Press, 1993

Synopsis

Set against the turbulent decades of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, this absorbing biography of the much-neglected intellectual Granville Hicks unfolds in the age of rising fascism, the Great Depression, leftist politics, World War II, the Cold War, McCarthyism, and American anti-intellectualism.

Born in 1901 in Exeter, New Hampshire, Hicks was greatly influenced by the New England tradition of moral consciousness and political idealism. The authors trace his career as a journalist for The New Masses, his tumultuous relationship with communism, his struggle with the request to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and his return to small-town life.

Hick's remarkable writing career with The New Leader and the Saturday Review are closely studied, along with his pioneering works on American and British literature. The biography places this giant of modern literature and criticism among the remarkable generation of writers that included Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, John Steinbeck, and Alfred Kazin, and marks his influence on the early career of Flannery O'Connor, Bernard Malamud, and others.

About this title

About the Author

Leah Levenson is an independent scholar residing in Worchester, Massachusetts.

Jerry Natterstad is Professor of English at Framingham State College. They are the co-authors of Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington: Irish Feminist.

From the Inside Flap

"Levenson and Natterstad's painstaking research yields a wealth of details concerning Hicks's activities as a writer and political activist."
-Publishers Weekly

Reviews

Renowned for his literary criticism, Hicks (1901-1982) was an editor for the New Masses during the 1930s, and he analyzed American writing from a Marxist perspective (e.g., The Great Tradition ). Levenson and Natterstad's painstaking research yields a wealth of details concerning Hicks's activities as a writer and political activist, but they offer little insight into his character. In 1935 Hicks was dismissed from a teaching position because he was a Communist; and yet, after Nazi Germany and the Soviet Unon signed the nonaggression pact in 1939, he became disillusioned with the Party. The authors, clearly sympathetic to their subject, shine the kindest possible light on his subsequent controversial decision to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953 and implicate former colleagues as Communists. Even after this, Hicks continued to write influential book reviews, which spurred the careers of such writers as Flannery O'Connor and Bernard Malamud; he also published several novels of his own and an autobiography. Levenson is an independent scholar, Natterstad is a professor of English at Framingham State College in Massachusetts.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Hicks, now largely forgotten, was a controversial but influential critic of the American literary and political scene of the 1930s. As the literary editor of the Communist-controlled New Masses , he judged the literary output of the time from the Marxist vantage point. He was also a skillful polemicist for the cause of communism in the United States. He resigned from the party and renounced communism following the signing of the Soviet-Nazi pact in 1939 and forged a new career as a literary journalist and teacher, earning himself a solid reputation for sound judgment of new literature. This is a full and sympathetic account of his career by scholars, with an ample rendering of the period's literary and political currents. Recommended for academic and large public libraries.
- Harry Frumerman, formerly with Hunter Coll., New York
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1566391040
• ISBN 13: 9781566391047
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 303