The Romance of American Communism

by Vivian Gornick

Overview

Writer and critic Vivian Gornick’s long-unavailable classic exploring how Left politics gave depth and meaning to American life

“Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class.”

So begins Vivian Gornick’s exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project.

Now back in print after its initial publication in 1977 and with a new introduction by the author, The Romance of American Communism is a landmark work of new journalism, profiling American Communist Party members and fellow travelers as they joined the Party, lived within its orbit, and left in disillusionment and disappointment as Stalin’s crimes became public.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788735520
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	04/07/2020
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	507 KB

About the Author

Vivian Gornick is a writer and critic whose work has received two National Book Critics Circle Award nominations and been collected in The Best American Essays 2014. Growing up in the Bronx amongst communists and socialists, Gornick became a legendary writer for Village Voice, chronicling the emergence of the feminist movement in the 1970s. Her works include the memoirs Fierce Attachments (1987) and The Odd Woman and the City (2015) and the classic text on writing, The Situation and the Story.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction xv

Chapter 1 To Begin With 3

Chapter 2 They Came from Everywhere: All Kinds of Beginnings 28

The Jewish Marxists Sarah Gordon Ben Saltzman Selma Gardinsky Joe Preisen Belle Rothman Paul Levinson 30

The Dos Passos Immigrants Dick Nikowsski 59

The American Populists Will Barnes Blossom Sheed Jim Holbrook 66

Those of the Middle Kingdom Mason Goode Arthur Chessler Marian Moron Diana Michaels 85

Chapter 3 Living It Out: From Vision to Dogma and Halfway Back 107

The Ordinariness of Daily Activity and the Revolution Around the Corner Sarah Gordon Selma Gardinsky Blossom Sheed 109

The Wholeness of the CP World Dina Shapiro Arthur Chessler Norma Raymond Eric Lanzetti 112

The Party Unionist Maggie McConnell 125

Ambivalence: Beneath the "Wholeness" Disintegrating Conflict Esther Allen Mason Goode Lou Goodstein 130

Going into Industry Karl Millens Maurey Sachman 145

The Underground Nettie Posin Hugh Armstrong Bill Chaikin 158

What We Did to Each Other Sam Russell Sophie Chessler Tim Kelley 169

The Lure of the Disciplined Revolutionary Party Larry Dougherty Ricardo Garcia 182

Chapter 4 They Went Back into Everywhere: Varieties of Aftermath 190

Politics Without the Party Is Unthinkable Jerome Rindzer Grace Lange David Ross 193

The Anti-Communist Communist Max Bitterman 203

The Wounds of the Past Arnold Bea Richman 214

"I Lost More Than I Got" Morris Silverman Carl Peters Dave Abetta 219

"Communism Was Part of the Journey" Diane Vinson 227

"It Was the Best Life a Man Could Have Had" Anthony Ehrenpreis 234

The Political Emotion Embodied Boris Edel 242

"I'll Tell You What a Communist Is" Eric Lanzetti 248

Chapter 5 To End With 256

Editorial Reviews

"The best book ever written on the inner life of socialists."
—Corey Robin, New York Magazine

“When first published in the 1970s, Vivian Gornick’s book helped to launch her distinguished career as a writer and humanized, explained and, yes, romanticized, a generation of American radicals … Thanks to the dysfunctionality of American capitalism, socialism has reentered the American political vocabulary. Gornick introduces us to a slice of history we need to know.”
—Eric Foner, author of Battles for Freedom

“Gornick’s language is so fresh and so blunt; it’s a quintessentially American voice, and a beautiful one.”
—Dwight Garner, New York Times

“The lasting value of her work lies in her commitment to the question of what it means to feel ‘expressive’: to experience the feeling that tells a person ‘not approximately, but precisely’ who they are.”
—Dayna Tortorici, New York Review of Books

“I first read The Romance of American Communism in the early eighties, and it has been for many years the book I would rescue if my house was burning down. I based the the narrator of my first novel, The Cast Iron Shore, on the character of ‘Diane Michaels,’ a vain shallow woman for whom communism had made her better than she was—‘it could all have been so much worse.’ Vivian Gornick explores the passion of ideas rather than the ideas themselves, how they make us human. This book has languished out of print for far too long.”
—Linda Grant, author of A Stranger City

“A profound guide to the ecstasy and despair of living a life structured by political commitment. These accounts of ordinary Communists will make you ache for such a coherent and purposeful world, even as Gornick shows with enormous sensitivity how it all fell apart. In our new era of political intensity, everyone should have this subtle and exquisite book on hand.”
—Sarah Leonard

“Her unrepentant belief in strong feeling as the heartbeat of any political approach to the world explains why, though many good histories of American communism have appeared since Romance, none have captured, elevated, and lit up the experience in quite the same way.”
—Lana Dee Povitz, Los Angeles Review of Books

“[Gornick] presents her interview subjects like characters in literature, as the protagonists of their own experience, and, for that reason, the book is not simply documentary but a work of literature, too, rich, moving, and contradictory.”
—Alexandra Schwartz, New Yorker

“First published in 1977, Gornick’s book feels as relevant now as it ever did. As new secular movements, from reactionary atavism to progressive social justice activism, capture our imaginations and provide us with a feeling of belonging, The Romance of American Communism provides a valuable glimpse into just how vital these movements can be—and how potent they are at creating community.”
—Tara Isabella Burton, Washington Examiner

“Gornick’s task in Romance was clear. She wanted to rekindle [the] flame not for warmth but for illumination, to retrieve the truth of the communist experience, as it was lived from the inside, from the highbrow obscurantism of Cold War liberalism.”
—Nation

“Most brilliantly evoked, however, is the exhilaration of conversion and the soul-expanding experience of finding a cause … again and again people speak of the sense of purpose and meaning they derived from being communists; they speak of a process of ‘becoming’ and a sense of ‘wholeness’: a cohesion between what they believed in and what they poured their life’s efforts into.”
—Guardian

“Romance is a color portrait against the black-and-white rhetoric of the Cold War … The newfound interest in Romance speaks to a growing, shared desire to work, together, to extricate humankind from the trap in which it is now caught.”
—Sophie Pinkham, The New Republic

“Gornick offers no blueprints, but she teaches us that we must address the slippery ingredient of the emotions of a committed political life by first recognizing and naming them. Besides being wonderful, The Romance of American Communism is also a bit strange because it is so seductive.”
—Alan Wald, Boston Review

“A passionate, unwieldy auto-ethnographic work that zoomed out from her own upbringing to encompass the everyday life of the Communist Party in the United States … Gornick [is] interested in the prefigurative aspect of political organizing, in which action in the present serves not just as a step toward change in the future, but also as a model for that change.”
—Ari Brostoff, n+1

“A crucial book for today’s radical movements.”
—Steven Wishnia, The Indypendent

“Extraordinary … More than a political writer, Gornick is an intensely social writer: usually classified as an ‘oral history,’ Romance can be described as a book of conversations that is also about conversation, and about the relationship between conversation and conversion.”
—Lola Seaton, New Statesman

“A key go-to writer for those seeking insight on organised resistance in previous generations.”
—Fiona O’Connor, Morning Star, Best Books of 2020

“In its exploration of the emotions, relationships, love and heartbreak of political commitment, Romance is an engrossing book.”
—Charlie Morgan, Oral History

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