Lineages of the Literary Left

For nearly half a century, Alan M. Wald’s pathbreaking research has demonstrated that attention to the complex lived experiences of writers on the Left provides a new context for viewing major achievements as well as instructive minor ones in United States fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism. The essays in this volume in honor of Alan M. Wald investigate aspects of intellectual, literary, and cultural movements and figures associated with left-wing politics beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing into our own time. Intimately linked with social struggle, the thinkers and actors analyzed in these diverse essays can be collectively understood to form the intertwined lineages of the Literary Left.

Paula Rabinowitz is professor of English at the University of Minnesota. Her books include "Black & White & Noir: America s Pulp Modernism", and she is the coeditor of "Habits of Being", a four-volume series on clothing and identity.

Howard Brick is the Louis Evans Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism (1986), Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (1998) and Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (2006).

Robbie Lieberman is Professor of History at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. She is the author of "My Song Is My Weapon": People's Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture and The Strangest Dream: Communism, Anti-Communism, and the U.S. Peace Movement, 1945-1963.