Ian Peddie

The Hunted Revolutionaries: Narrating Class in Twentieth-century American Literature Ian Peddie

Taking its title from a Thomas McGrath poem, The Hunted Revolutionaries argues that as the pressure on US left-wing writers grew in the wake of increasing disenchantment with communism at the end of the 1930s, so writers developed more nuanced forms of resistance that reflected the central importance of race and ethnicity in American society. While challenging the notion that left-wing writing was formulaic and propagandistic, this study also complicates the idea of a monolithic left, suggesting instead that there were many lefts in existence and attempts to impose unitary views on writers were as futile as explications that dismissed left-wing writing as party-directed articles of faith. Using the writing of Nelson Algren, Thomas McGrath, and Langston Hughes, this book connects their work to the lived experiences they chronicled, from the heady days of the 1930s through McCarthyism to the nuclear age and beyond. In so doing, it provides an innovative approach to left-wing writing, one that allows readers to better understand how the sense of humanism that inspired these writers was borne of an assurance that class matters.