Gimmie your commie lit

July 15, 2023 9:37 PM

Can you recommend books on the Communist Party USA? Most seeking a definitive history but I know there are lots of books about specific time periods, episodes, sub-groups, memoirs.. etc so open to your recs there too.

Had a really hard time picking a category here... 'work & money'? 'society & culture'??

posted by latkes to Media & Arts (3 answers total)

I loved Vivian Gornick's The Romance of American Communism - not at all a definitive history, but a really insightful portrayal of a particular generation of Communists looking back on their youthful activism from middle and old age. Some are totally disillusioned, some still true believers but all of them are beautifully drawn by Gornick as if they are protagonists in an elegant noir-ish novel.
posted by Lluvia at 3:58 AM on July 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

Dorothy Day's autobiography The Long Loneliness chronicles her early involvement with the Communist party before she turned to Catholicism. It's been a long time since I read it, so I can't remember how much of it is about her involvement with the party. Day was one of the founders of the Catholic Worker movement, which grew partly out of her interest in Communism.

Maybe look for stuff by and about journalist John Reed? The movie Reds is about his life and career.
posted by FencingGal at 5:57 PM on July 16, 2023

In the 1940s and 1950s there was a genre of memoirs or "confessions" by former Communist party members recalling their experiences in the party in the 1920s 30s and 40s. Some were widely read and influential in the US in the 1950s during the McCarthy era.

The best known of these was Witness (1952) by Whittaker Chambers, which was influential on, and recommended by, Richard Nixon, William F Buckley, and Ronald Reagan.

There was also a memoir by Richard Wright, best known for his novel Native Son (1940) and memoir Black Boy (1945). His memoir American Hunger , about his experiences with the party, was supposed to be the sequel to Black Boy but was not published until 1977, after his death. An excerpt appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1944 and then in the anti-communist anthology The God That Failed (1949), which also contains memoirs by others.
posted by JonJacky at 11:53 PM on July 16, 2023