1 ALAN M. WALD Marxist Literary Debates in the 1930s Parts of the Truth The traumatic onset of the 1930s retains its darkly mythic pull over any attempt to represent this complex and variegated period. The very notion of a “Thirties Culture” should invite skepticism, especially if the enterprise entails a retroactive search for a governing logic. Even the idea of a distinct- ive chronology can be deceptive inasmuch as the decisive events that made up the beginning of 1930s culture are still open to debate, and the continuing attentiveness to so many aspects of the decade up to the present show that there are ways in which it has never really ended. By economic class, region, gender, and color, the experience of the era was different for different kinds of cultural workers and audiences. Although there are various 1930s, the attraction to radicalism of so many of the best-known and respected writers of the time continues to compel the attention of abundant students, scholars, and political activists. This engagement with radicalism was foreshadowed by the 1927 Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee, formed on behalf of the two anarchist Italian immigrants accused of murder. Writers such as John Dos Passos (1896–1970) and Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) took to the streets, and a remarkable amount of fiction, poetry, drama, and art was produced to commemorate their failed effort to obtain clemency. A more coherent kind of movement, with Marxism at center stage, was emphatically under way by the 1932 appearance of the “Culture and the Crisis” manifesto of the League of Professionals for Foster and Ford. This was issued under the names of Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941), Langston Hughes (1902–1967), Edmund Wilson (1895–1972), and fifty other intellectuals who proudly supported the Communist Party presidential election campaign. Ever since, decade after decade, young people have felt a sense of solidarity with the motivating point of this effort. That is, 1930s literary radicalism represents a still-unfinished exertion on the part of a new generation committed to creatively thinking its 18 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108593892.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press