The Modern American Novel of the Left: A Research Guide

(Hardback)

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Unique in its scope of coverage, this reference work provides students and scholars interested in researching modern American leftist and working-class culture with a convenient starting place for examining American leftist and working-class novels of the past century. The book begins with a brief historical survey of the development of this cultural phenomenon. It then offers brief descriptions of selected critical, historical, and theoretical works that are a useful background to the novels. The bulk of the book comprises detailed alphabetically arranged discussions of more than 170 modern American novels of the Left, along with brief considerations of more than 240 other works. The novels discussed in detail include a number of works by major American authors, including John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, and Upton Sinclair. Also covered are works by a number of other writers in the rich but neglected tradition of American leftist literature. These writers naturally include 1930s proletarian novelists such as Mike Gold, Agnes Smedley, Myra Page, Josephine Herbst, Tillie Olsen, Meridel Le Sueur, Jack Conroy, and Thomas Bell. But they also include figures ranging from early twentieth-century socialists such as I. K. Friedman and Leroy Scott, to African American novelists such as Richard Wright and Toni Morrison, to Chicano writers such as Alejandro Morales and Americo Paredes.

Reviews

Booker's preface provides an excellent brief historical survey of the development of the American novel of the Left, from the end of the nineteenth century to the present....This guide is a major contribution to American literary history and to an understanding of twentieth-century American culture.-ARBA
"Booker's preface provides an excellent brief historical survey of the development of the American novel of the Left, from the end of the nineteenth century to the present....This guide is a major contribution to American literary history and to an understanding of twentieth-century American culture."-ARBA

Author Bio

M. KEITH BOOKER is Professor of English at the University of Arkansas. He is the author of numerous articles and books on modern literature and literary theory, including The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism (1994), Dystopian Fiction: A Theory and Research Guide (1994), Bakhtin, Stalin, and Modern Russian Fiction: Carnival, Dialogism, and History (1995), and The Modern British Novel of the Left: A Research Guide (1998), all available from Greenwood Press.