Proletarian literature

Proletarian literature refers to the literature created by working-class writers for the class-conscious proletariat, published by the communist parties. It was a literature without literary pretensions.

The avantgardist Proletkult of the first years of the Russian revolution, was different from the later, traditional and realist Proletarian novel of the Stalin years. It florished in Russia, where many people needed to learn to read and write and was popular with communist readers in Europe, Japan, China and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. The genre was rediscovered at the end of the 1960s by the maoist wing of the student movement.

In the United States, Mike Gold was the first to promote proletarian literature, in Max Eastman's magazine The Liberator (magazine) and later in The New Masses. The party newspaper, The Daily Worker also published literature, as did numerous other magazines like The Anvil, edited by Jack Conroy, Blast, and Partisan Review.

American examples of the proletarian novels include Mike Gold's Jews without Money (1930) and Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth (1929), and Robert Cantwell's Land of Plenty (1934). James T. Farrell, Howard Fast, The Last Frontier (1941), Albert Halper, Josephine Herbst, Albert Maltz, Tillie Olsen, and Meridel Le Sueur were other well-known proletarian writers.

Literature

Anthologies

• The American Writer's Congress edited by Henry Hart. International Publishers, New York 1935.
• Proletarian Literature in the United States: an Anthology edited by Granville Hicks, Joseph North, Paul Peters, Isidor Schneider and Alan Calmer; with a critical introduction by Joseph Freeman. International Publishers, New York 1935. ^[1]

Studies

• Aaron, Daniel: Writers on the Left. Harcourt, New York 1961.
• Denning, Michael: The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. Verso, 1996.
• Foley, Barbara: Radical Representations. Duke University Press, 1993.
• Murphy, F.: The Proletarian Moment. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Ill 1991.
• Nelson, Cary: Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left. Routledge, 2001.
• Rabinowitz, Paula: Labor and Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1991.
• Rideout, Walter B. The Radical Novel in the United States: 1900-1954. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1956.
• Steinberg, Mark. Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910-1925. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. (On proletarian literature in late-imperial and early Soviet Russia)
• Wald, Alan M.: Writing from the Left. Verso, 1984.
• Wald, Alan M.: Exiles from a Future Time. University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

References

1. ^ Joseph Freeman: Introduction to Granville Hicks and others (editors): Proletarian Literature in the United States, International Publishers, New York 1935.