“Spoon River Anthology” (1915) by Edgar Lee Masters, a collection of autobiographical verse monologues in epitaph form, was named by Eliot Weinberger as the “century’s most influential book of American poetry” alongside T.S. Eliot’s “Waste Land.” A new book on Masters from University of Illinois Press is a good occasion for examining the neglected subject of Spoon River’s Jews.
An attorney who fought for workers’ rights, Masters has been described as a “violent antisemite,” possibly in part due to his association with the novelist Theodore Dreiser, who did indeed loathe Jews.
Yet Masters had a more complex rapport with Yiddishkeit, as might be expected from a leftist who worked as law partner of Clarence Darrow. Darrow was so philosemitic that he wrote a short story, “Little Louis Epstine” about a Jewish paperboy who lost one hand in an accident (“He was run over by a beer wagon when he was a baby”) and the other to frostbite.
Sur study argentine literary journal and its role development culture 19311970 | Latin American literature
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Mucho más que la nieta de Manuel - El Diario del centro del país
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Tarnished Gold
At a time when Communism continues to maintain a patina of coolness despite the tens of millions murdered by its adherents and the billions who have lived under its tyrannies, Patrick Chura has written a sympathetic biography of American Communism’s foremost literary hatchet man.
Michael Gold: The People’s Writer is a volume in the SUNY series in Contemporary Jewish Literature and Culture. Chura, a professor of English at the University of Akron, offers a pro forma mea culpa by admitting that Gold might have been wrong in his idolization of Stalin before asserting that American Communists like Gold were “collectively, a peaceful, democratic, and consistently progressive force for good in United States social history.” Gold’s life and work supposedly offer lessons for today on how to defeat “racism, anti-Semitism, fascism, and xenophobia.” Such praise is not warranted, not for Gold and not for the CPUSA.