Long description:

Taking its title from a Thomas McGrath poem, The
Hunted Revolutionaries argues that as the pressure on
US left-wing writers grew in the wake of increasing
disenchantment with communism at the
end of the 1930s, so writers developed more nuanced
forms of resistance that reflected the central
importance of race and ethnicity in American society.
While challenging the notion that left-wing writing
was formulaic and propagandistic, this study also
complicates the idea of a monolithic left, suggesting
instead that there were many lefts in existence and
attempts to impose unitary views on writers were
as futile as explications that dismissed left-wing
writing as party-directed articles of faith. Using
the writing of Nelson Algren, Thomas McGrath, and
Langston Hughes, this book connects their work to the
lived experiences they chronicled, from the heady
days of the 1930s through McCarthyism to the nuclear
age and beyond. In so doing, it provides an
innovative approach to left-wing writing, one that
allows readers to better understand how the sense of
humanism that inspired these writers was borne of an
assurance that class matters.