Реферат: Jospeh Freeman

Fearing, Muriel Rukheyser, W. H. Auden and others.

And what about the San Francisco School? In the Thirties, when the New Masses was

still a literary magazine, we published the poems of Kenneth Rexroth.

In the theatre we did not have the angry young men. We did have Eugene O’Neill,

Clifford Odets, Robert Sherwood, Maxwell Anderson and Lillian Hellman. There is nothing

today that is quite like the Theatre Union, the Group Theatre and the WPA theatre.

Out of the theatre movement of the Thirties came Orson Welles and Clifford Odets, Elia

Kazan and Budd Schulberg, Arthur Miller and Harold Clurman, who began his distinguished

career in the theatre as a drama critic for the New Masses. And out of the Thirties

came dozens of the best actors of stage and screen. And from the literary movement

inspired by "social consciousness" Hollywood acquired some of its best screen

writers: Dalton Trumbo, Albert Maltz, John Howard Lawson, Michael Blankfort. And out of

the Thirties there also came some of our best literary critics: Granville Hicks, Horace

Gregory, Robert Gorham Davis, Yvor Winters, O. F. Mathiessen, Newton Arvin, Alfred Kazin.

That was the decade when many American writers and artists "went Left" as the

phrase was, and there were magazines and groups where these men and women found scope for

their energies, aroused by a passion for democratic justice, a fear of totalitariansim, an

immense hope for the future.

We have no such groups and no such magazines today. Everywhere writers and artists

complain of their isolation. It’s everyone for himself and the publisher or dealer

take the hindmost.

In the Thirties, writers and artists were creative not only individually but together.

They were bound together in comradeship by a common faith, a common basic cause, a vision

which fired their creative powers. That vision was worldwide. When we in the United

States held our writers’ congresses in the Thirties, we had fraternal delegates from

France, and exiled writers from Spain and Germany and Italy. And when President Lazaro

Cardenas called a congress of writers, artists and scientists in Mexico City early in

1937, several Americans were invited to attend as delegates.

An extraordinary number of writers of all kinds wrote for the New Masses in