Реферат: Jospeh Freeman

a poetry magazine we founded; or for Partisan Review, founded as an offshoot of

the New Masses and the John Reed Clubs and edited brilliantly to this day by two

able writers who began their careers in the pages of the New Masses in the early

Thirties.

Let us note this. In those days there were magazines of that kind which

developed ideas and published writers, looked for writers and took particular pains

with unknown writers. Many distinguished novelists, poets, critics, screenwriters

and dramatists got their start in one or more of these magazines.

They were not commercial magazines and never made any profit. They were dedicated to a

dream and when they encouraged young writers it was for the sake of that dream. To find

and develop new writers was to find and develop new champions of the Cause; or as Walt

Whitman put it, echoing England’s Puritan Revolution, The Good Old Cause, The Great Idea.

This idea, this vision of the Thirties gave as all something that is lacking today. We

speak of conformity and non-conformity, but this is a byproduct. What we had in the

Thirties and what is lacking today is the inspiring vision and what it gives people.

One writer has called the Thirties The Red Decade; another, The Angry Decade. Each of

these descriptions is true–in a way. But if I may paraphrase Saint Augustine, all this is

false in a way precisely because it is true in a way.

Many people in the Thirties were angry at injustice, as Steinbeck was in The grapes

of Wrath; and many people became radical. But this was not the focal point of the

decade. The focal point was the vision and around that vision we found cooperation,

community, and communion.

———-

What was the dream, the vision which animated and inspired American writers in the

Thirties; roused their creative powers to the highest pitch; united them in cooperation,

community and communion with each other, with writers the world over and with millions of

men and women everywhere, from every class, race and group, every occupation, every

financial bracket, every social level?

Before I try to define this vision, let us face one other fact about the Thirties. It