Social-Protest Fiction

Radicals.

The full literary impact of Marxism came in the 1930s, but the Russian Revolution and the political suppressions during the 1920s influenced American writers who were socialists if not communists. These writers attempted to use literature as a class weapon. The most productive radical novelist of the decade was Upton Sinclair (1878-1968). A veteran of earlier protests, Sinclair published Boston (1929), a two-volume novel based on the Sacco-Vanzettti case. The younger literary radicals included Floyd Dell, Joseph Freeman, Max Eastman, and Michael Gold. John Dos Passos (1896-1970) was the most innovative—and the most talented—of the young radicals. Although he later moved to the Right, during the 1920s and 1930s he used news reports of oppression and injustice in his fiction-as-contemporary-history novels. Dos Passos experimented with techniques from cinema and modern painting to provide impressions of...

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