Small Town

Granville Hicks: Champion of the Small Town

Granville Hicks (1901–1982), while best known as an advocate of the small town, was a widely published author, literary critic, and early socialist. After graduating from Harvard University, Hicks married Dorothy Dyer in 1925 and taught briefly at Smith College before accepting a position as an English professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1929. The remainder of his life was devoted to literary pursuits. He counted many literati as his friends and colleagues, including Newton Arvin, Malcolm Cowley, Carson McCullers, Bernard Malamud, Wright Morris, Richard Rovere, and John Unterecker. Hicks joined the Communist Party in 1935 and was subsequently dismissed from the Rensselaer faculty; he renounced Communism four years later. During this period, he served as literary editor of the New Masses and authored two works which presented a Marxist approach to literature (The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature Since the Civil War and Figures of Transition: A Study of British Literature at the End of the Nineteenth Century). He also became fascinated with and authored two biographical works on the contemporary activist, John Reed (John Reed: The Making of a Revolutionary and One of Us: The Story of John Reed). His other works included a retrospective look at his former interest in Communism and his honest yet unapologetic autobiography (Part of the Truth). During these years, Hicks also authored two additional works of modern literary criticism as well as four novels with small-town settings (The First To Awaken, Only One Storm, Behold Trouble, and There Was a Man In Our Granville Hicks: Champion of the Small Town w a r r e n f. b r o d e r i c k Town). During his career, the prolific Hicks contributed many articles and reviews to a variety of magazines and journals. He removed from Grafton in 1978 because of poor health and died in New Jersey in 1982. Formerly one of the major industrial and cultural centers in the Northeast, by the 1930s, Troy, New York, had declined to the status of a dingy, depressed former mill city. Hicks found Troy particularly unappealing and began looking for a summer home in the country. Many weekends were devoted to house-hunting in rural Rensselaer County and in nearby Massachusetts and Vermont . In May of 1932, he spotted an advertisement in a newspaper : an eight-room farmhouse for sale on 40 acres of land, only 15 minutes east of Troy. The farm was located on Shaver Pond Road in the Town of Grafton, Rensselaer County, north of the new “State Road” (Route 2). The story-and-a-half wooden home was nestled among old sugar maples, former agricultural fields, and young forest, and its land extended to Shaver Pond, an unspoiled mountain lake. The old house lacked electricity, and the road was sometimes closed due to snow, ice, or mud, but Granville and Dorothy Hicks soon fell in love with its simple charm. They purchased the farm for $1,750, and Granville and Dorothy soon became very friendly with the nearby Agan family (who had once lived in the house). Grafton was then a town of fewer than 650 residents, with little or no industry aside from logging. It had once supported subsistence farming and small local industries and was a minor resort community, but now, like much of rural America, the town was experiencing hard times. The town center along Route 2 consisted of a village green surrounded by neat but plain houses, two churches, two stores, and a one-room schoolhouse . The town center struck Hicks as “comfortable and homelike—not dignified, not impressive, certainly not beautiful, but not unattractive.”1 This simple rural “charm,” as James Kunstler reaffirmed 60 years later, is far more than a sentimental Granville Hicks: Champion of the Small Town xviii platitude; it implies a quality “that makes our physical surroundings worth caring for.”2 The Hickses entertained friends at their summer home, including such literati as Newton Arvin, Robert and Hope Davis, Howard and Frances Wilde, Edith Walton, and Henry Christman . During his first years in Grafton, Granville Hicks was not greatly involved in the Grafton community. “On the whole,” he wrote in Small Town, “we did not belong to the town. . . . the part of life that was . . . intellectual, professional, and social, had little to do with Roxborough [Grafton]. The manuscripts I read came from New York, and the manuscripts I wrote...