Left Wing Litany

[Toby G Levy]

Jbor will undoutedly roll his eyes and shake his head, but John Leonard,
in the course of an appreciation of E.L. Doctorow provides a litany of
left-wing novelists and novels:

from The Prophet By John Leonard

New York Review of Books Volume 51, Number 10 · June 10, 2004

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17175

I began thinking about Doctorow as, among novelists, our preeminent
lefty. There is a richer literature than is sometimes suggested, from
the John Dos Passos who hit the streets for Sacco and Vanzetti to the
Max Eastman who put Big Bill Haywood in a novel to Sherwood Anderson's
Marching Men, Jack Conroy's The Disinherited, Joe Freeman's Never Call
Retreat, Mike Gold's Jews Without Money, and James T. Farrell's Danny
O'Neill quartet, plus Josephine Herbst, who was informed on to the FBI
by Katherine Anne Porter, Mary Lee Settle, who devoted one novel to
Mother Jones and another to Harlan County and the Spanish Civil War, and
Theodore Dreiser, Nelson Algren, Lillian Hellman, Edward Dahlberg, Kay
Boyle, Waldo Frank, and Tillie Olsen, as well as Norman Mailer's Barbary
Shore, Clancy Sigal's Going Away, Harvey Swados's Standing Fast, and
Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, after which I will forget a few but certainly
not Chuck Wachtel, who in The Gates left the Lower East Side for Managua
and Sandinismo, Richard Powers, who in Operation Wandering Soul tried to
save third-world orphans in a public hospital in Watts, and Grace Paley,
who has enjoined the rest of us to "go forth, with fear and courage and
rage to save the world."

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