Dos Passos, John (1896–1970)

John Dos Passos was an American writer best known for his ‘contemporary chronicles’ of American life. His early novels, including Manhattan Transfer (1925) and the U.S.A. trilogy — The 42nd Parallel (1930), Nineteen Nineteen (1932), and The Big Money (1936) — are considered classics of American Modernism, offering a complex and multifaceted portrayal of American society from the turn of the century to the Great Depression. The depiction of urban experience in these novels reflects the cinematic montage of Dziga Vertov, the stream-of-consciousness style of James Joyce, and the dynamism and simultaneity of Italian Futurism, among other influences. In addition to writing fiction, Dos Passos was a dramatist, poet, historian, journalist, travel writer, painter, and translator. His first two novels, One Man’s Initiation: 1917 (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921), are harrowing and highly critical accounts based on his experience as an ambulance driver in the First World War. He published a collection of free verse, A Pushcart at the Curb (1922), as well as translations of the modernist poetry of Blaise Cendrars. In the late 1920s he worked briefly as a director, playwright, and set designer at the Vsevolod Meyerhold-inspired New Playwrights’ Theater in Greenwich Village, where his associates included communist writers like Mike Gold and John Howard Lawson.

Ryan, Oscar (1904–1989)

The leading cultural activist in the Canadian Communist Party in the 1930s, Oscar Ryan was the formative figure in the Workers’ Theatre movement in Canada and a tireless advocate of revolutionary theatrical modernism. Born Oscar Weinstein, he took his underground name from his mother’s maiden name, Rein. He grew up in Montreal and Winnipeg and after high school joined the Young Communist League as a full-time party activist. With an idiomatic and forceful proletarian writing style in the manner of John Dos Passos and Mike Gold, he became a writer for the Communist Party’s Daily Worker and its successors, the Daily Clarion and the Canadian Tribune. As Martin Stone, he was a theater critic for the Tribune from 1955 to 1988. In the Communist Party of Canada, he was an early supporter of Tim Buck, who took over the party in 1929 when communist parties around the world assumed a more radical militant stance in answer to Stalin’s call for revolutionary class war. Under Buck, Ryan became a leading figure in the party’s propaganda wing, a cultural organizer, publicity director of the Canadian Labour Defence League, and the author of numerous pamphlets.

The “Albert Maltz Affair” and the Debate over Para-Marxist Formalism in New Masses, 1945–1946

This article reexamines the “Albert Maltz affair” in light of debates about art and literature in the journal New Masses (1926–48), as well as in international Marxist aesthetics. I argue for a reexamination of the “para-Marxist” theory of art he developed to clarify the role of leftist criticism and the “citizen writer.” The controversy stirred by the publication of Maltz's “What Shall We Ask of Writers?” (New Masses, 12 February 1946) is only fully appreciated through the aesthetic implications that many historians of the Hollywood Ten have overlooked. The immediate attacks on Maltz by critics like Mike Gold were motivated primarily by the view that a properly Marxist aesthetics must follow the Leninist–Zhdanovite theory of “art as a weapon.” More importantly, the support that Maltz and like-minded authors earned from New Masses readers for expressing the “Engelian” thesis that left-wing critics should evaluate art for dialectical tensions of form (and not solely for proletarian messages) suggests that this episode might be read as a beacon of salutary developments in international Marxist aesthetics rather than as an omen of American communist repression caused by the HUAC trials.