American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams

Preface

P R E FA C E TH I S B O O K E X A M I N E S the life, work, and in›uence of Carey McWilliams: author, attorney, activist, and editor of the Nation from 1955 to 1975. It de‹nes his work broadly to include his many books and articles; his stint in California state government; his efforts on behalf of social, political , and legal causes; and his stewardship of a national magazine. It also considers his personal and professional development, the ‹erce and sometimes unreckoning resistance to his work, and the remarkable range of friends, associates, and adversaries he accrued over his long career. Finally, it assesses his prodigious literary output, the scope and depth of his in›uence, and the reasons for his growing reputation in the academy. This assessment leads to a surprising conclusion: that McWilliams—who remains unknown to most readers today, not to mention the culture at large—was one of the most versatile, productive, and consequential American public intellectuals of the twentieth century. With a dozen books and hundreds of essays and articles to his credit, McWilliams was an astonishingly productive writer. His biography of Ambrose Bierce appeared when he was twenty-four and a full-time attorney . He composed his ‹rst best-seller, Factories in the Field (1939), between court dates and by writing nights, weekends, and holidays. In the 1940s alone, he produced seven books, two while heading California’s Division of Immigration and Housing (DIH). Half of his books are still in print, and most continue to attract the highest critical praise. Author and California state librarian emeritus Kevin Starr has called McWilliams the state’s most astute political observer and “the single ‹nest non-‹ction writer on California—ever.” Arthur Schlesinger Jr., no friend of McWilliams, considered the Bierce biography excellent and three other books (Factories in the Field, Brothers Under the Skin, and North from Mexico) ‹rst-rate. Historian Gerald Nash has called California: The Great Exception (1949) a minor classic, and Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (1946) is still regarded as the best interpretive history of the Los Angeles area. McWilliams was as in›uential as he was productive. César Chávez credited much of his understanding of California agribusiness to McWilliams. Southern California Country inspired Robert Towne’s original screenplay for Chinatown (1974), perhaps the most widely admired Hollywood ‹lm of its generation, and Luis Valdez’s play Zoot Suit (1979) was drawn directly from North from Mexico (1948). When Prejudice appeared in 1944, a Supreme Court dissenting opinion cited it four times in the landmark Korematsu v. United States case, which upheld the constitutionality of the Japanese-American internment during the Second World War. McWilliams’s in›uence can also be seen in the work of Kevin Starr, urban critic Mike Davis, writer John Gregory Dunne, Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, and countless journalists who continue to cite him extensively . In the academy, too, McWilliams’s presence registers in such diverse ‹elds as ethnic studies, labor history, and urban planning. In 1993, Patricia Nelson Limerick, a leading historian of the American West, observed that her ‹eld was still catching up to McWilliams’s work of forty years earlier. At least some of McWilliams’s in›uence can be traced to his impressive network. Although he began writing as an alienated outsider, he eventually became one of the best-connected writers and editors in the country. Over his ‹fty-year career, he came to know such diverse ‹gures as H. L. Mencken and Martin Luther King Jr., Mary Austin and Jerry Brown, Robinson Jeffers and Orson Welles, Edmund Wilson and Harry Bridges, Arthur Miller and Alger Hiss, and Upton Sinclair and Eugene McCarthy. At the Nation, he also published talented younger writers who would go on to reach even larger audiences, including Ralph Nader, Hunter S. Thompson , counterculture observer Theodore Roszak, and social historian Howard Zinn. At every stage of his career, McWilliams showed a remarkable knack for identifying and working productively with talented writers, editors, and public ‹gures. Most of McWilliams’s appeal now, however, can be traced to his authorial strengths, especially his lucidity, range, and powers of observation. His ability to see social patterns steadily and whole led him to topics that other viii P R E F A C E writers would neglect until their signi‹cance was more obvious. As Michael Teitz...