American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments American Night holds fast to the chronological span and major themes projected at the start of this multivolume venture. It brings to a close three decades of the literary Left depicted as a conduit of political struggle passing through phases significantly marked by romantic utopianism, antifascism, and resistance to domestic repression. Earlier volumes may be consulted for the procedures followed in these pages regarding the use of political terminology and identifying tags and dates, as well as for a “Chronology of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Cultural Left” (found in Exiles from a Future Time, pp. 327–29), which situates the establishment of Communist publications and organizations along with background events—the Moscow Trials, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Prague Trials. Much of the research conducted for the first two books is also the basis for the third. The acknowledgments sections of the earlier volumes provide a fuller understanding of source materials. They also identify the institutions (academic as well as other networks) that have sustained my research and the individuals who inspired my literary and political thinking. Yet some changes in plans must also be disclosed. Since I began research, there has occurred a welcome outpouring in scholarship about specific areas of the postwar Left that addresses topics of direct concern to my own work. This impressive body of writing (only some of which is cited in the endnote that follows) includes academic volumes, memoirs, anthologies, dissertations, and key essays about the continuity between the Communist legacy and the emergence of the Black Arts movement and other forms of ethnic nationalism; the impact of the Popular Front tradition in mass culture and children’s literature; the intersection of the Left and pulp fiction; the attendance of the Left in Cold War poetry; the omnipresence of radical connections to film and television; the Cold War “diaspora” of political refugees abroad; and even books specifically about writers’ resistance to the Cold War.1 In light of these advances, my own effort to craft a story both original and cogent has induced me to omit or curtail a few of the topics promised in earlier volumes and to add new ones.2 Here I must apologize to many individuals who provided me with materials that I was not able to use, and especially in regard to writers who were targeted for analysis but ended up being mentioned only in passing. I acquired far more information than could be in- 392 Acknowledgments serted within a limited number of pages, although I plan to employ some of this material in projects to come. A scholar working in a complicated and controversial area such as the Left in the Cold War must take preventive measures to counter one’s natural tendency to draw the conclusions that one wants to draw. American Night rests in the first instance on original primary research. When oral history is involved, there is always a risk of naively falling susceptible to those veterans who recount their stories in a compelling and assured manner, although nearly all such narratives are populated by at least a few self-serving or score-settling vignettes. Even the vast amount of letters and manuscripts one finds in archives can be selectively preserved and tweaked byauthors (and sometimes further pruned by family members), hiding as much as is revealed. In navigating these sources, the researcher mostly designs his or her own controls for accuracy by reading widely, opening oneself to opposing points of view, noting where informants are few, and cross-checking information. But what finally prevents scholars in the humanities from massaging data to spin their work in a way that tells a prettier or uglier story than they really should are the hard questions posed by others. These interrogations come from the quantity and diversity of the informed people interviewed in the primary research, colleagues in the field who reach other conclusions that they make known in print, independent-minded readers of the drafts of the manuscript who query and complain, students in classes who are especially valued when they speak up to inject doubt or dissent, and participants in conference sessions and seminars where the early versions of work are presented. I have been fortunate in finding challenging interlocutors at every turn. Several individuals were kind enough to read over chapters-in-progress on subjects about which they had unusual expertise : Peter Drucker, Konstantina Mary Karageorgos, Aaron Lecklider, Elisabeth Petry, Marlon Ross, and Alexander Saxton. Others went beyond the call of duty in...