Radical in the American Grain (Critical Perspectives on the Past) - Hardcover

Leonard Wilcox

9780877229292: Radical in the American Grain (Critical Perspectives on the Past)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0877229295 ISBN 13: 9780877229292

Publisher: Temple Univ Pr, 1992

Leonard Wilcox's biography of V. F. Calverton and his Modern Quarterly traces the passionate career of one of the Old Left's most influential spokesmen and portrays the intense and turbulent intellectual milieu of the 1920s and 1930s. In this first full-length study of a much-neglected figure of the American Left, Wilcox contends that, as an editor and public intellectual, V. F. Calverton's role was crucial in setting the agenda for dialogue on the Left through much of those decades.
Born George Goetz in 1900, Calverton was influenced early on by the Village Left of the 1910s, particularly by his heroes Van Wyck Brooks, Randolph Bourne, John Reed, and Max Eastman. Offering his home at 2110 East Pratt Street in Baltimore as a place to air literary, political, and artistic ideas, Calverton's soirees drew together such well-known figures as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, A. J. Muste, Alain Locke, Scott Nearing, Max Eastman, and Norman Thomas. In 1923, he founded the Modern Quarterly and he edited it until his death in 1940. The journal served as a major forum for intellectual debate and Marxist critique and was largely responsible for sustaining a distinctively American strain of independent radicalism through the Stalinist-dominated years of the 1930s.
In his attempt to fashion a vision of radical community, Calverton drew upon the progressive and pragmatic strains of the prewar intellectual Left, which stressed a pluralistic flexibility and the ideal of a shared culture of critical exchange. His nonpartisan and freely speculative Modern Quarterly provided a bridge between the prewar Left and the anti-Stalinist Left, which emerged in the late 1930s. The author also investigates the relationship between the political and the personal, examining the connection between Calverton's chronic loneliness and profound fear of death and recurring themes of his radical thought such as his quest for community. "Calverton's career," observes Wilcox, "embodies the complexities as well as the contours of American radicalism in the early twentieth century, particularly the tension between individualism and collectivism." V. R Calverton rediscovers an important American intellectual leader whose search for a native radicalism enhances our understanding of the American Left between the wars.

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