A classic analysis of the American leftist writers of the 1900s, their work, and the political, social, economic, and cultural environment in which they existed--originally published in 1956 (Harvard U. Press) and reprinted with a new preface (8 pp.) by the author. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Radical Novel and the Classless Society analyzes utopian and proletarian novels as a single socialist tradition in U.S. literature. Utopian novels by such writers as Edward Bellamy, William Dean Howells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Sutton E. Griggs and proletarian novels by such writers as Robert Cantwell, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, Meridel Le Sueur, Claude McKay, and Ralph Ellison can help us conceive of a unity of utopian and Marxist socialisms. We can combine the imagination of the future classless society with present-day socialist strategy. Utopian and proletarian novels help us to imagine—and realize—the classless society as achieving the utopian goal of recognizing race and gender and the Marxist goal of overcoming social class.

Despite the vigorous study of modern American fiction, today's readers are only familiar with a partial shelf of a vast library. Gordon Hutner describes the distorted, canonized history of the twentieth-century American novel as a record of modern classic