Bohemian Bolsheviks

Bohemian Bolsheviks offers a sharp reminder that historical narrative not only shapes our sense of the terrain under our feet, but the horizon in front of us.

Marxist political alignment engages a welter of intimate and biographical factors enriching the record of a varied history of fiction, poetry, literary criticism, and other intellectual practices. In this book, Alan Wald sets out to explore a field of study which is marked by the enduring paradoxes of modernity. The rubric “Bohemian Bolsheviks” perfectly captures Wald’s sustained fascination with persistent contradictions between the image of Left political commitment and the actuality of experience, especially in relation to cultural work and cultural workers.

Publication date: April 14, 2026

Acknowledgments

Introduction– Marxism and Literary Radicalism: Methodology, Memory, and the Lure of Easy History

Part 1 The Left in US Literature

1 Inconvenient Truths: The Communist Conundrum in Life and Art

2 The Culture War Over Literary Communism

3 Imagined Solidarities: The Bolshevik Revolution and the Literary Left

4 Reconstructing the ‘Humanscape’ of Left Culture and Commitment: An Interview with Alan Wald

5 Noir and the Ebb of Radical Hope

Part 2 Fiction and Poetry

6 Steinbeck and the Proletarian Novel

7 Back to the Future in Howard Fast’s Freedom Road

8 American Poetry and the Popular Front

9 The Murdered Dreams of Aaron Kramer: A Marxist Poet In The ‘American Century’

10 Hero– International Brigade

11 Marxism and the Modernist Poet: A Tale of Two Delmores

Part 3 Gender and the Left

12 Bohemian Bolsheviks After World WarII: A Minority Within a Minority

13 Sanora Babb in Her Time and Ours

14 ‘Sexing the Left: Interview with Alan M.Wald,’ by William J.Maxwell

15 Wheelwright and His Kind

16 Motley’s Men: The Queer Haunting of We Fished All Night

17 The Trotskyist Time Forgot: The Permanent Rebellion of Nicolas Calas

18 The Red and the Queer

Part 4 Race and Class

19 The Marxist Imagination of Theodore Ward

(September15, 1902–May8, 1983)

20 Race and the Logic of Capital

21 Protesting the Protest Novel: Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground

22 The Black Internationalism of William Gardner Smith

23 Blood on the Forge: A Masterful Proletarian Novel

24 From ‘Triple Oppression’ to ‘Freedom Dreams’

Part 5 Commitment

25 ‘A Seemingly Incongruous Alliance’: Bryan Palmer, Revolutionary Teamsters

26 Trotsky: Between the Power and the Dream

27 Fascinating Antifascism: Enzo Traverso’s Fire and Blood

28 A Theater for the Poor: Cleveland and SDS/ERAP in the Mid-1960s

29 Gramsci’s Gift

30 H.Chandler Davis, a Lifelong Radical and a Moral Touchstone for the Left

31 The Straight and the Crooked: BDS Versus Settler-Colonialism

Part 6 The Radical Vision

32 Riddle Me This, Comrade: 100 Years of US Communism

33 Protest, Passion, Politics

34 Reaching for Revolution

35 The Present of Future Things

36 Astonished by the Present: The Impatient Life of Daniel Bensäid

37 Missives for the Future: Michael Löwy’s Close Encounters with the US Left

Bibliography
Index