Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties (New York Review Books Classics) - Softcover

Kempton, Murray

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590170873 ISBN 13: 9781590170878

Publisher: NYRB Classics, 2004

Synopsis

Through brilliant portraits of real persons who created the myths and realities of the 1930s, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Murray Kempton brings that turbulent decade to life. Himself a child of the time, Kempton examines with the insight and imagination of a novelist the men and women who embraced, grappled with, and in many cases were destroyed by the myth of revolution. What he calls the "ruins and monuments of the Thirties" include Paul Robeson, Alger Hiss, and Whittaker Chambers, the Hollywood Ten, the rebel women Elizabeth Bentley and Mary Heaton Vorse, and the labor leaders Walter Reuther and Joe Curran.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

hed in 1955, Part of Our Time consists of ten incomparable "novellas" that profile individuals whose lives were transformed by the radical movements of the thirties. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Murray Kempton writes of people who "shared at one time or another the conviction that the most important thing in life was a remorseless effort to throw down the society which had raised and alienated most of them." Included are portraits of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, Walter Reu-ther, Lee Pressman, Paul Robeson, Edmund Wilson, and James T. Farrell; the writers of the Hollywood left; as well as many now-forgotten labor leaders, politicians, and mobsters--all of whom were caught up in what the author calls "the myth of the thirties."
    "Part of Our Time is a striking piece of work," said The New Yorker. "Kempton is a journalist of formidable talent and versatility. He can be serious, he can be funny, he can be evocative. E

From the Back Cover

"In presenting his segments of history Kempton uses the technique of the novelist--and it comes off brilliantly. He succeeds in evoking the characters of the men and women he writes about, and he does what only the good novelist can do: he re-creates the atmosphere of the time in which they functioned and so forces the reader to inhabit a world which may be alien, dimly recalled, or long forgotten."
--The Nation

"Murray Kempton is the best we have, and better than we deserve."
--Joan Didion

"Murray Kempton is the greatest of newspapermen. . . . He is a moralist who does not preach; an artist who reports."
--David Remnick

Edition details

• Publisher: NYRB Classics
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1590170873
• ISBN 13: 9781590170878
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 360