Alan M. Wald
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807835869
- eISBN:
- 9781469601502
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807837344_wald.6
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter considers the fortunes of the postwar proletarian tradition in criticism and the synthetic intellectual world of Communist literary critics, primarily Samuel Sillen and Charles Humboldt. ...
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This chapter considers the fortunes of the postwar proletarian tradition in criticism and the synthetic intellectual world of Communist literary critics, primarily Samuel Sillen and Charles Humboldt. In Communist Party publications, Sillen's specialty became U.S. literature and literary history, but he wrote on many other subjects, including theater and politics. Charles Humboldt was the true genius of the Communist cultural movement in the 1940s and 1950s. In contrast to Sillen, he also represented a semisecret opposition to the worst excesses of socialist realism, seeing a margin of hope in the work of Communist artists such as Picasso and Neruda.Less
This chapter considers the fortunes of the postwar proletarian tradition in criticism and the synthetic intellectual world of Communist literary critics, primarily Samuel Sillen and Charles Humboldt. In Communist Party publications, Sillen's specialty became U.S. literature and literary history, but he wrote on many other subjects, including theater and politics. Charles Humboldt was the true genius of the Communist cultural movement in the 1940s and 1950s. In contrast to Sillen, he also represented a semisecret opposition to the worst excesses of socialist realism, seeing a margin of hope in the work of Communist artists such as Picasso and Neruda.
