Left Letters: Culture Wars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman

The names of Mike Gold (1893-1967) and Joseph Freeman (1897-1965) predominate in cultural histories and literary annals of the 1920s and 1930s as the most prominent literary Communists during the heyday of American Communism. James Bloom examines their works and careers, demonstrating the persisting relevance of these once prominent writers. Each writer's reputation now rests on one major book, Gold's "Jews Without Money" (1930) and Freeman's "An American Testament" (1936). Their more comprehensive contributions, however, have been largely forgotten, an ironic development, Bloom observes, in view both of the left-wing movement of literary scholarship in the USA over the last 20 years, and of the persistence of their agendas in much contemporary writing, notably E.L. Doctorow's "The Book of Daniel".