Offered here for the first time as an Omnibus E-Book, this
collection brings together Alan M. Wald's ground-breaking
trilogy.
American Night, the final volume of this unprecedented
trilogy, brings Alan Wald's multigenerational history of Communist
writers to a poignant climax. Using new research to explore the
intimate lives of novelists, poets, and critics during the Cold
War, Wald reveals a radical community longing for the rebirth of
the social vision of the 1930s and struggling with a loss of moral
certainty as the Communist worldview was being called into
question. The resulting literature, Wald shows, is a haunting
record of fracture and struggle linked by common structures of
feeling, ones more suggestive of the "negative dialectics" of
Theodor Adorno than the traditional social realism of the Left.
The second of three volumes by Wald that track the political and
personal lives of several generations of U.S. left-wing writers,
Trinity of Passion carries forward the chronicle launched in
Exiles from a Future Time. In this volume Wald delves into
literary, emotional, and ideological trajectories of radical
cultural workers in the era when the International Brigades fought
in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and the United States battled in
World War II (1941-45). Confronting questions about Jewish
masculinity, racism at the core of liberal democracy, the corrosion
of utopian dreams, and the thorny interaction between antifascism
and Communism, Wald re-creates the intellectual and cultural
landscape of a remarkable era.
In
Exiles from a Future Time, 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.