New Yorker staff writer Becca Rothfeld recently deleted her entire Substack account — apparently after a misbegotten spasm of criticism against a fellow establishment writer embarrassed her into pulling the whole thing. It’s a small detail but a revealing one about a critic whose recent New Yorker article “Why the American Novel Refused to Grow Up” calls for literary maturity while demonstrating something quite different.

The European preference runs deep with Rothfeld. By her own admission she feels closer to European novels than American ones, finds herself most at home with “barely American” writers like Henry James and Edith Wharton — both of whom spent most of their adult lives in Europe and wrote novels that approximate the European social tradition more than any original American one — and was only recently looking forward to reading Wieland, Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 gothic novel that most American literature students encounter in their first year. Better late than never, one supposes, for a critic examining the American novel, diagnosing what ails it, and prescribing what it needs. Her comfort zone is the European tradition she holds up as the missing standard. She barely knows the real American tradition — though that ignorance is not hers alone. The suppression of the vital core of the American tradition, which is literary populist, is instilled into all readers, whatever their preferences.

A quick glance at Becca Rothfeld’s CV shows that she has endeavored to achieve virtually every possible academic credential. That’s why she doesn’t know her own literature — or rather, that’s how the suppression works through individuals, credentialing them into the establishment and away from the vital tradition. She looked to the establishment institutions and the institutionalized and not to the people to understand literature and culture. This is the typical imperial formation that has long afflicted American and world literature — hollowing out its imagination and intellect, its production, criticism, and distribution.

The establishment has claimed Rothfeld as its own. Harvard Professor and renowned literary critic James Wood, whose criticism has spent decades perfecting the exclusion of the people’s literary tradition while mapping the private psychological interior with great sophistication, effusively praised Rothfeld’s essay collection All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess:

This is a radical and important book ... she stages passionate duels between egalitarianism and distinction ... and wins the battle, beautifully and eloquently, for the side of expansiveness and mess and desire. It’s a thrilling struggle, thrillingly prosecuted.

Wood knows a thousand things about fictional portraiture of private psychological realms but seems to not know a single thing about the tradition that mapped the full human condition — private and public both, personal and political. His praise for Rothfeld is the establishment recognizing itself. Rothfeld and the Harvard Professor could do better if they would only apply themselves.

It was the clash between opposing forms of life, one stale and encrusted, the other ascendant and disruptive, that drove the development of the European novel.

So writes Rothfeld in her New Yorker article reviewing the New York Review Books reissue of Leslie Fiedler’s classic book of literary criticism Love and Death in the American Novel — a book whose central argument, as Rothfeld’s article subtitle puts it, is that “the country’s best and worst fiction was shaped by visions of escape from society — and therefore from maturity.” Rothfeld suggests that American “literary sensibility … remains underaged” but her analysis of why goes no deeper than Fiedler’s framework permits. She thinks American fiction hasn’t achieved the maturity of the European social novel, and what’s needed now are novels dramatizing the “clash” between “stale and encrusted” liberalism and “ascendant and disruptive” Trumpism. It’s a diagnosis that mistakes the surface for the structure, the political electoral carnival and its culture games for the deeper economic, material, and social reality of American life, let alone global reality. Absent from her account — and from the canonical tradition she inherits — is the engaged liberatory dispossessed organic consciousness — the basic revolutionary consciousness that long since emerged from within the experience of the exploited, the colonized, the excluded, and that sees society from below and from outside rather than from within its establishment assumptions. Rothfeld notes the literary ruins of the American novel and then can only reach the conclusion her institutional and ideological capture allows. “Perhaps ... we will find it in ourselves to put away childish things and write something new,” she prays — meaning, perhaps we will finally develop as the European novel did and write the American version of Tolstoy on the prairie — Trump running rampant through the liberal wreckage of America.

The Fiedler argument she reapplies is real enough: “it is maturity above all things that the American writer fears.” Fiedler’s actual central argument in Love and Death in the American Novel is more specific and more provocative — that the American novel characteristically avoids adult heterosexual love and instead pursues homosocial bonds and death, that it escapes from society into the wilderness or the sea or a frontier space, and that this evasion is the defining feature of the American literary tradition from Cooper through Twain through Hemingway. The Rothfeld subtitle simplifies and softens that considerably, losing the specific content of what Fiedler meant by escape and what he meant by maturity — the heterosexual adult social world — the domestic, the civilized — of the European novel of manners, marriage, and class.

Rothfeld’s modest addition to Fiedler’s view is that adolescence has itself grown more self-conscious since Fiedler wrote, and so too has the literature — which isn’t saying much. Self-conscious immaturity is still immaturity, and may be a worse trap, substituting awareness of the problem for resolution of it. Even of today’s “superb” autofiction novels — Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, the latter title evoking Europe and Hemingway, whose own celebrated novels were also set in Europe — Rothfeld argues:

But none are quite adult in the rich, sophisticated way that Fiedler thought the best novels in the [European] tradition were. None are quite about the conflicting frames of reference and value that arise when an ancient cultural formation disintegrates and a successor has yet to take its place. It was the clash between opposing forms of life, one stale and encrusted, the other ascendant and disruptive, that drove the development of the European novel.

Rothfeld pivots to “we are standing amid the ruins” between Trump carnage and liberal “wreckage” and “occupy an uncomfortable interregnum between two social formations.” Her implied argument is that American fiction should have been achieving European social novel maturity all along, and the Trump-versus-liberalism clash provides the current material for that achievement. It’s a coherent conclusion from her premises and imperial ideology. It’s also the most impoverished possible reading of the moment. When you consider what she actually envisions, that our time is one of the “wreckage” of liberalism “stale and encrusted” and Trumpism “ascendant and disruptive,” it’s the establishment’s superficial understanding of our era, the only one her institutional world can see, or is allowed to see within the ideological constrictions of capitalist empire. The deeper conflict, between capitalism in all its liberal and reactionary forms and a genuinely liberatory socialist alternative, is exactly what the buried great literary populist tradition in the American novel engaged and dramatized and what her framework cannot accommodate, tolerate, or even see. The liberal-conservative imperial establishment is blind — its criticism unseeing, its novels blinded half-creations.

The conclusion Rothfeld reaches — novels about the conflict between “stale and encrusted” liberalism and insurgent Trumpism, her version of the European social novel transplanted to the American moment of liberal “wreckage” and “ascendant and disruptive” Trumpism — reveals how completely she has accepted Fiedler’s account. Taking his description of the American tradition as exhaustive, she can only wish American fiction would do what European fiction does, updated for the current political “interregnum.” She has no framework for seeing that a genuinely American alternative to both the evasive tradition Fiedler describes and the European social novel she values already existed, flourished briefly, and was deliberately destroyed. Her benchmark for what better American fiction would look like becomes inevitably the European social novel — Tolstoy, Stendhal, Flaubert, fiction that takes society as its subject and dramatizes the “clash of social formations” through characters navigating competing systems of value within the established social order rather than escaping them, let alone overturning them. This is what she means when she writes that the best American novels are not “quite adult in the rich, sophisticated way that Fiedler thought the best novels in the [European] tradition were.”

But Fiedler’s argument is that American fiction defines itself against that European standard — not by failing to achieve it but by refusing it, by escaping into homosocial bonds, wilderness, death — Huck and Jim, Moby Dick — away from the domestic and the social world the European novel inhabits. American fiction isn’t a failed European novel. It’s a different thing entirely, organized around evasion of the adult social world rather than engagement with it. So Rothfeld is lamenting that American fiction hasn’t become what Fiedler shows it refuses to be. Fiedler explains why she isn’t getting the European novel she wants but both Fiedler and Rothfeld are blind together. The tradition they can’t see — engaged literary populism — the Big Bang tradition — is neither the evasive American literature Fiedler describes nor the European social novel Rothfeld holds as the missing alternative. It is a third thing entirely.

The great novelists of the American literary Big Bang, during the Harlem Renaissance and the American socialist era of the late 1920s and early 1930s, did not escape in their novels into wilderness and homosocial bonds primarily, and they did not primarily produce the European novel of manners and marriage and class. They produced something new — organic, dispossessed, liberatory, anti-imperial — a literature that engaged the clash of “social formations” — exploring social and psychological strife and celebration — not from the perspective of those navigating society’s competing value systems from within “society,” as in the main European tradition, but from the far-seeing perspectives and intensely visceral experiences of those the imperial system was designed to exploit and destroy — from a perspective of engaged and liberatory literary populism. That is a different and in many ways greater achievement than either tradition — greater than the canonical American evasion Fiedler describes and greater than the European social novel Rothfeld prefers. It is what a mature American literature actually looks like — not European social fiction transplanted, not the canonical American evasion, but something that could only have emerged in a diverse and socialist era America (and world), from the lived experience and the liberatory battle of the dispossessed in the American empire. Neither Fiedler’s framework nor Rothfeld’s longing for European maturity can accommodate or even perceive it. And this buried tradition is not only American.

The American novel did more than refuse to grow up. It grew up — brilliantly, organically, in ways that neither Fiedler nor Rothfeld can see, or perhaps care to. The great breakthrough in the American novel has been suppressed ever since.

A century ago, a tradition of literary populist fiction emerged in America that did something vital that Rothfeld senses is needed, and has been needed all along, but that she can’t comprehend or explain, because she longs for the European novel, not the American novel. These were writers who wrote from within colliding social forces rather than observing society from a safe institutional distance — writers who were themselves organically part of the conflict between the dying capitalist order and something new trying to emerge. Call it diverse liberatory socialism. Call it the people’s literature growing out of the Harlem Renaissance and the revolutionary socialist era in American and international life. Call it, as I do in a long critical essay on the subject, the American Big Bang in the novel.

Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money (1930) follows the Jewish immigrant poor of New York’s Lower East Side with a ferocity and tenderness that no canonical novel of the period approaches. It doesn’t dramatize poverty as background atmosphere or as an entitled sensitive observer’s occasion for feeling — it inhabits the world from the inside, makes it the substance and structure of the novel itself, with a liberatory perspective on it all. Gold’s people are not victims of a cruel system observed from outside. They are people fighting to live inside a system designed to destroy them, and they know it.

Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth (1929) is the autobiography-as-novel of a woman born into rural poverty in Missouri who becomes a revolutionary journalist and political activist. It traces the making of a radical consciousness from childhood poverty through social action through international revolutionary politics. Daughter of Earth is what might be called an activist bildungsroman in which what the protagonist learns is not how to accommodate, accept, and take her place in society but how imperial society works and why it must be fought. It is one of the great American novels, possibly the greatest, and almost no one has read it.

Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1929) brought the full force of African American working class experience into the novel — not as sociology, not as protest in a narrow sense, but as fully realized worlds of perspective and experience with their own beauty, complexity, and political consciousness. McKay wrote the first bestselling novel by a Black author published in America, and the establishment promptly buried him.

There were other great literary populist novels of the watershed moment, including one by Langston Hughes. A couple by Nella Larsen. Wallace Thurman. H.T. Tsiang. D’Arcy McNickle. And others. A whole tradition of writers from the dispossessed — from the excluded, the colonized, the exploited — who wrote vital mature fiction in the deepest sense, fiction that engaged with the “clash of social formations” not as metaphor or atmosphere or within establishment ideology but as revealing, revolutionary, and fully human consciousness and experience.

Lively, powerful, and mature, this is the great living tradition Rothfeld is calling for without knowing it exists. Fiedler and the rest of the American canon and literary establishment have conditioned her not to see it, so she latches onto the establishment ideology of the European novel as a known mature social novel alternative. The work she prays for was achieved — the mature American novel, briefly in an astonishing burst in its literary populist form — and has existed in a fragmentary way ever since, while being suppressed the whole while. It was buried systematically as the establishment canon was hastily cobbled together by the forces of empire — white and capitalist — white empire. At the moment of the literary populist Big Bang in 1929, the phrase “literary canon” was apparently first used in American literary discourse — and it was used against literary populism. The practice of canonizing American works had begun informally in the 1890s with the first American literature courses and textbooks, but it was in 1929 that the canon found its name — and its target, looking backward through imperial lenses to provide the blueprint for all the exclusions that followed.

The suppression was not and is not accidental. In the wake of the people’s revolutions in Russia and Mexico, the revolutionary ferment across Europe, Asia, and the colonized world — China, India, Ireland, Hungary, and beyond — the white supremacist capitalist American empire needed to suppress the Harlem Renaissance and the combined American labor, socialist, and communist movements that were energized and inspired by these global upheavals. The Red Scares brought the imprisonments and deportations, the censorship and demolished careers, lives, and movements. Then the Cold War destroyed what remained of the institutional infrastructure that had briefly supported this great American literature — the communal and left magazines, the progressive and minority publishers, the political and social organizations that provided audiences and distribution. The FBI surveilled and harassed the writers. The critical establishment, led by figures like Lionel Trilling, built the canon around formalist values — symbolism, complexity, ambiguity, paradox, irony, the sensitive entitled individual consciousness — that systematically excluded the populist tradition and that were profoundly accommodationist to empire. The prize culture was created to reward privileged and entitled imperial literature rather than liberatory and engaged populist literature. The MFA system institutionalized those values and reproduced them generation after generation.

The New Critics — Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom — three men who between them managed to make American literature safe for the Confederacy and unsafe for everyone else — who were mainly reactionary “Southern Agrarians,” who almost titled their first manifesto “A Tract Against Communism,” and whose eviscerating ideas were fully embraced by the imperial academic establishment — completed the job aesthetically, establishing close reading of the isolated text as the only legitimate critical method and thereby ruling out criticism that engaged with the social conditions of literary production or the political commitments of writers. A novel’s relationship to class struggle, to colonial dispossession, to the organized suppression of working people — these became, by critical fiat in the court of criticism, irrelevant to literary value. What mattered was irony, ambiguity, nuance — moderation abstracted from history — rather than the bold, the direct, the explicitly political, the socially conscious and engaged. The New Criticism redirected critical attention and redefined literary seriousness from populist socially conscious brilliance to entitled and privileged interior delineations, making the Big Bang tradition invisible as literature, and literary populism impossible as story.

The result is Rothfeld’s essay — a serious critic at The New Yorker, writing in 2026, calling for a mature American literature that engages with conflicting social movements, structures, and forces, with no apparent knowledge that such a literature existed, flourished briefly, and was deliberately destroyed by the institutional forces that now employ and protect her. That The New Yorker has long been among the primary instruments of that burial — stale and encrusted in its own right, however much lauded by the literati — is the point exactly.

This is what successful suppression looks like. It buries the work and it buries the knowledge that the work existed, so that each generation of serious critics, and novelists, rediscovers the need for it without knowing it was ever met, calls for something new without knowing it had already happened, prays for a maturity and a way forward that was achieved and then purposefully and continuously crushed.

Rothfeld, as with the literary establishment in general, diagnoses the literary disease without being able to name the ideological cause, because naming the cause would require both the knowledge and the courage that implicate the institution she writes for, and the institutions that trained her and rewarded her, in the literary crime. The New Yorker, the prize culture, the MFA system, establishment criticism, the canon, imperial academics — these are not innocent bystanders to the suppression of the core and most vital American literary tradition, the suppressed people’s literary tradition, engaged literary populism. To proceed from her literary diagnosis to its badly needed cure would require Rothfeld to turn her critical tools on the institutions that trained and employ her, and that is what her institutional context cannot permit. The burial of the greatest American literature was so complete that a serious critic at The New Yorker can unwittingly call for what was achieved and destroyed without knowing either happened — the great work and the infernal burial. This is called literary expertise. The result of a literary education, of a certain kind.

The greatest American novelists — the uncanonized — already found the cure. A century ago. The literary Big Bang happened. The greatest American literary tradition — diverse, populist, politically serious, formally innovative, liberatory, written from within the lived experience of the dispossessed, variously anti-imperial — emerged and flourished briefly and was buried by an ongoing empire of suppression that extends from the Red Scares to the Cold War to the present New Yorker.

When someone actually follows Rothfeld’s attempt at literary diagnosis to where it leads, this is what you find.

It was not a minor or marginal tradition, this liberatory engaged literature, this literary populism, though it was furiously marginalized and made minor in stature. In the fourteen months between January 1929 and February 1930 — the American literary Big Bang — six engaged organic dispossessed writers produced the greatest concentrated achievement in the American novel: Claude McKay, Agnes Smedley, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Wallace Thurman, and Mike Gold, soon followed by H.T. Tsiang and D’Arcy McNickle, and others. That Hemingway, Wolfe, and Faulkner also published novels in that same fourteen months — novels since canonized rather than buried — illustrates where American literature went wrong. The literary Big Bang novels were formally serious, politically explicit, and organically inside the material they dramatized, inhabiting the dispossessed consciousness fully, combining personal experience and structural analysis in ways the canonical tradition never achieved.

This was also not a provincial achievement. The American scene of the 1920s was not an outpost of Parisian modernism but a parallel and superior one — more diverse, more formally serious, more politically alive. The magazines that made it possible — The Masses, The Liberator, The Messenger, Opportunity, Fire!!, The New Masses, The Crisis — in reality far overshadowed the Paris little magazines in import if not in reputation. The Crisis reached 100,000 readers at its peak by speaking to and for the people. The New Yorker has always preferred a different, more select company. Jessie Redmon Fauset as literary editor of The Crisis midwifed the New Negro literature into being, publishing Hughes, McKay, Larsen and others before their books existed. Mike Gold did the same for the socialist scene through The New Masses, pre-publishing excerpts of Jews Without Money before its release. What Paris celebrated as the summit of modernism was not the summit. The summit happened back across the Atlantic, in Harlem and the American socialist scene. The summit was then blown apart by capitalism, imperialism, and its rubble buried.

This is the tradition contemporary authors need to build upon — not Hemingway’s stoic wounded masculinity, not Fitzgerald’s romantic class yearning, not Faulkner’s tedious retrograde involutions, not the endless recycling of the entitled sensitive individual consciousness and its private injuries. The Big Bang writers showed what American fiction looks like when it grows up — when it writes from within the far-seeing experience of the engaged dispossessed, when it takes on the “clash of social formations” not as metaphor or within the establishment’s permitted political parameters — liberalism versus conservatism, Democrat versus Republican — but as the full revolutionary reality — capitalism versus liberatory socialism, empire versus the dispossessed — when it combines formal seriousness with political explicitness and organic consciousness, when it is anti-imperial and counterhegemonic. That is, when it is fully conscious and most direct, honest, and perceptive of both self and society. That is the greatest literary tradition, and it is available and has been practiced globally, and is often beaten down by the various imperial establishments. It persists. It can be dug up, continued, revived, expanded, and must be. The question is whether contemporary writers will find it, read it, and build upon it — or whether the empire of suppression will continue to do its work.

The buried core tradition in the American novel is one that Fiedler, Wood, Rothfeld and the establishment don’t know as the central and most vital tradition — don’t know its full scope and achievement, and actively exclude from their critical frameworks and canonical judgments. Even much of the vocal left, well-educated as they are, have been trained not to see it. So the incapacity isn’t personal failure or simple ignorance, it’s the result of a specific ideological formation — imperial, institutional, credentialed — that makes the tradition literally imperceptible as central even when its individual components are nominally known. That’s more insidious than ignorance and more structural than willful exclusion.

The literary Big Bang in the American novel:

• Quicksand — Nella Larsen (1928)

• Home to Harlem — Claude McKay (1928)

• Passing — Nella Larsen (1929)

• Banjo — Claude McKay (1929)

• Daughter of Earth — Agnes Smedley (1929)

• The Blacker the Berry — Wallace Thurman (1929)

• Jews Without Money — Mike Gold (1930)

• Not Without Laughter — Langston Hughes (1930)

• The Hanging on Union Square — H.T. Tsiang (1935)

• The Surrounded — D’Arcy McNickle (1936)

Read the core tradition, the real American literary renaissance. Then ask why your literary program never mentioned it. The program was busy doing other things.

The full argument — the writers, the suppression, the canonical indictment, the people’s liberatory canon — is in “The Big Bang They Buried: The Fake Canon and the Suppression of the American Novel,” serialized beginning with “The Big Bang, the Big Secret, the Big Lie.”

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The Federal Writers Project produced the most significant oral history archive in American history — the slave narratives, interviews with formerly enslaved people conducted between 1936 and 1938, which are among the most important primary documents of African American experience available. These oral histories directly informed the post-Big Bang tradition’s organic dispossessed mode. Toni Morrison drew on them extensively, as did many other writers.

The Federal Writers Project also produced the American Guide Series — state and regional guidebooks written by unemployed writers including Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Nelson Algren, Studs Terkel, and many others. The program employed over 6,000 writers at its peak, including John Steinbeck, Zora Neale Hurston, May Swenson, Loren Eiseley, Conrad Aiken, Margaret Walker, Eudora Welty, William Attaway, and Claude McKay. Wright was writing Native Son while employed by the Federal Writers Project in Chicago.

The Federal Theatre Project produced dramatic work — including the Living Newspaper format, a documentary theater that exposed capitalism’s criminal operations directly and contemporaneously, in the organic dispossessed Big Bang mode. The Living Newspaper plays — Triple-A Plowed Under, One Third of a Nation, Power — were the theater’s equivalent of the Big Bang novelists’ structural indictment, naming the agricultural crisis, the housing crisis, and the utility monopolies as criminal operations in real contemporaneous time. The Federal Theatre Project was shut down by Congress in 1939 because it was too politically explicit. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigation called it communist propaganda and Congress defunded it — retaliatory suppression against the most explicitly counterhegemonic cultural infrastructure the state ever funded.

The film industry was not directly supported by the WPA but the documentary film tradition — Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River, both funded by New Deal agencies — produced the most politically explicit American cinema before the Hollywood blacklist era. These films showed the Dust Bowl and the Mississippi flooding as the consequences of corporate agricultural policy and capitalist land use rather than as natural disasters — the system exposed as criminal through the documentary form in real contemporaneous time.

The Plow That Broke the Plains was the first film created by the US government for commercial release and distribution through the Resettlement Administration as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal program. The Resettlement Administration recruited Pare Lorentz to produce The Plow That Broke the Plains to support its campaign of showing the public that the search for profits in the West resulted in the displacement of settlers, misuse of the land, and ultimately resulted in the dust storms that affected the Great Plains regions in the 1930s. The film was one of the most widely publicized attempts by the U.S. federal government to communicate to its citizens through motion pictures.

If the progressive populists can come to power in the federal government, one of the first things they should do as part of implementing a Green New Deal is massively fund the arts for all the progressive populist reasons as happened during the WPA. You need to consciously build culture every bit as much as any other kind of vital infrastructure in a healthy and hospitable society.

The WPA arts programs were in part a pre-Cold War counter-institutional infrastructure — state funded, explicitly political, reaching mass audiences through theater and radio and documentary film, employing writers who would produce some of the post-Big Bang tradition’s most important liberatory works, along with many establishment canonical writers. The HUAC investigation and the defunding of the Federal Theatre Project in 1939 was the imperial establishment suppression machinery in full action. The state funded counterhegemonic cultural infrastructure and then destroyed it when it became too politically explicit. The Cold War suppression of the Big Bang tradition and the HUAC destruction of the Federal Theatre Project were the same ideological and institutional operation in different cultural domains in the same historical window.

The state still censors literature directly. PEN America documented over 10,000 book bans in American public schools and libraries in the 2022-2023 school year alone, targeting primarily books about race, sexuality, and gender, coordinated nationally through organizations like Moms for Liberty and reinforced by legislation like Florida’s Stop WOKE Act restricting what can be taught in schools and universities. But direct state censorship of this kind, though real and damaging, is not the primary suppression mechanism of art and literature. The Big Bang tradition — liberatory literary populism — was not suppressed primarily by book bans or legislative restriction. It was suppressed by the canonical apparatus’s aesthetic and institutional operations, by exclusion from the Armed Services Editions, by the intellectual smearing and ideological and institutional attacks of the New Critics, the Cold War cultural machinery, the prize culture, the MFA system, the agent infrastructure, the major publishers’ imperial ideological standards. Notice that the current state bans are against race, sexuality, and gender — not against class, empire, socialism, liberatory revolution, and war and genocide — because literature that is explicitly liberatory socialist, anti-imperial, and anti-war has already been pre-banned, out of thought and out of existence in the first place.

The current book banning movement is the cruder and more visible form of the imperial ideological operation — the suppression of the organic dispossessed tradition. It operates through different mechanisms and targets different texts. The state censors crudely and visibly through the removal of books from shelves. The canonical apparatus censors sophisticatedly and invisibly through the formation of literary consciousness — through what it teaches writers to write, readers to value, and prize committees to reward. The sophisticated invisible censorship has been more damaging to the organic dispossessed and anti-imperial tradition than the crude visible censorship because it operates not on finished books but on the consciousness that produces them, suppressing the tradition before it can be written or published rather than after it has been published and made available.

The 1930s WPA demonstrated that state investment in counter-institutional, counter-capitalist cultural infrastructure is possible and politically productive — and that it will be destroyed the moment it becomes too threatening to the imperial establishment unless the political power sustaining it is strong enough to protect it. It’s time for a New Green Deal in the arts. But first, progressive populists need to come to full power.

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This is a list of liberatory American novels as precursors to the literary Big Bang of the Harlem Renaissance and the American socialist era, as well as contemporaneous to it, and following it — 1853 to present. Some of these novels are wholly engaged dispossessed and suppressed and anti-imperial. Others are compelling partial examples, or adjacent, in an illuminating way. Some of the least canonical on this list should be known and read as the most canonical of their time. The cluster of novels from 1928 to 1930 — Larsen, Fauset, McKay, Thurman, Smedley, Gold, Hughes — represents the concentrated literary Big Bang moment at the tradition’s center, the greatest single achievement in American fiction and the most thoroughly suppressed.

The Heroic Slave (1853) — Frederick Douglass

The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854) — John Rollin Ridge

Our Nig (1859) — Harriet Wilson

Blake; or, The Huts of America (1862) — Martin R. Delany

Minnie’s Sacrifice (1869) — Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Trial and Triumph (1889) — Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Imperium in Imperio (1899) — Sutton E. Griggs

Sister Carrie (1900) — Theodore Dreiser

The Colonel’s Dream (1905) — Charles Chesnutt

The Jungle (1906) — Upton Sinclair

The Iron Heel (1908) — Jack London

The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) — W. E. B. Du Bois

Los de Abajo [Those Below] (The Underdogs) (1915) — Mariano Azuela

Marching Men (1917) — Sherwood Anderson

Plum Bun (1928) — Jessie R. Fauset

Quicksand (1928) — Nella Larsen

Home to Harlem (1928) — Claude McKay

Passing (1929) — Nella Larsen

Banjo (1929) — Claude McKay

Daughter of Earth (1929) — Agnes Smedley

The Blacker the Berry (1929) — Wallace Thurman

Jews Without Money (1930) — Mike Gold

Not Without Laughter (1930) — Langston Hughes

Strange Brother (1931) — Blair Niles

Young Lonigan (1932) — James T. Farrell

Girl (1932/1978) — Meridel Le Sueur

The Disinherited (1933) — Jack Conroy

Pity Is Not Enough (1933) — Josephine Herbst

The Young and Evil (1933) — Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler

Sundown (1934) — John Joseph Mathews

Somebody in Boots (1935) — Nelson Algren

The Hanging on Union Square (1935) — Hsi Tseng Tsiang

Yonnondio (1935/1974) — Tillie Olsen

The Surrounded (1936) — D’Arcy McNickle

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) — Zora Neale Hurston

East Goes West (1937) — Younghill Kang

Johnny Got His Gun (1939) — Dalton Trumbo

George Washington Gómez (1940/1990) — Américo Paredes

Native Son (1940) — Richard Wright

Blood on the Forge (1941) — William Attaway

If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) — Chester Himes

The Street (1946) — Ann Petry

America Is in the Heart (1946) — Carlos Bulosan

Maud Martha (1953) — Gwendolyn Brooks

The Dollmaker (1954) — Harriette Arnow

No-No Boy (1957) — John Okada

Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) — Paule Marshall

The Little Disturbances of Man (1959) — Grace Paley

A Different Drummer (1962) — William Melvin Kelley

City of Night (1963) — John Rechy

Down These Mean Streets (1967) — Piri Thomas

On the Yard (1967) — Malcolm Braly

The Bluest Eye (1970) — Toni Morrison

...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (1971) — Tomás Rivera

The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972) — Oscar Zeta Acosta

Mumbo Jumbo (1972) — Ishmael Reed

If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) — James Baldwin

Winter in the Blood (1974) — James Welch

Meridian (1976) — Alice Walker

The Salt Eaters (1980) — Toni Cade Bambara

A Flag for Sunrise (1981) — Robert Stone

A Gathering of Old Men (1983) — Ernest Gaines

This is the Way The World Ends (1986) — James Morrow

Trash (1988) — Dorothy Allison

Tracks (1988) — Louise Erdrich

Dirty Work (1989) — Larry Brown

Almanac of the Dead (1991) — Leslie Marmon Silko

Parable of the Sower (1993) — Octavia Butler

So Far from God (1993) — Ana Castillo

Green Grass, Running Water (1993) — Thomas King

Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) — Helena María Viramontes

Drown (1996) — Junot Díaz

Mosquito (1999) — Gayl Jones

Point of No Return (2005) — Andre Vltchek

The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) — Mohsin Hamid

Strange as This Weather Has Been (2007) — Ann Pancake

Where the Line Bleeds (2008) — Jesmyn Ward

Aurora (2016) — Andre Vltchek

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (2017) — Andrea Lawlor

There There (2018) — Tommy Orange

The Eyes of the Earth (2024) — Tamara Pearson

Notes:

1. Azuela was Mexican, and Pearson is Mexican-Australian, but if a novel is first or principally published in America by an American publisher then I include it here for the purpose of this list as a cultural production of America if not a novel by an American. Hamid is British-Pakistani but was substantially formed by American literary institutions, studied under Toni Morrison, lived extensively in the US, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist directly addresses American imperial power from the organic dispossessed position it produces globally.

2. With a few key exceptions, I limited this list to one novel per author, though some of these authors could have more novels included.

3. My own novels including Homefront (2003), Texas MFA — Canocanayesatetlo (2009), Empire All In (2016), Loop Day (2024), and Most Revolutionary (2025) attempt to work in this tradition.

4. Moby Dick (1851) by Herman Melville slightly precedes this list and its multicultural Pequod crew and Ishmael’s organic dispossessed consciousness approach the tradition’s requirements, but Ahab’s exceptional individual consciousness ultimately displaces the collective organic dispossessed mode the list centers.

5. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe published in the year between Moby Dick and The Heroic Slave had a huge liberatory cultural and political impact but remains the tradition’s founding contrast case — Black consciousness observed, and slavery opposed, from outside rather than from within, the system’s violence shown through the white abolitionist’s moral horror rather than through the organic dispossessed consciousness exposing it as criminal from within.

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It’s amazing how subservient literary production is in America.

The subservience is more complete than in almost any other domain of American cultural production because it disguises itself most successfully as freedom.

American cinema is subservient to corporate interests but everyone knows it — the blockbuster formula, the franchise, the test screening, the studio commands are all known and visible as constraints. American journalism is subservient to ownership interests, power access, and algorithms, and the constraints are ever more visible. American politics is subservient to big money donor interests, the plutocracy increasingly openly ruling.

American literary fiction is subservient to the same imperial interests as all of these and administered through the canonical hierarchy, the MFA constriction, the prize culture, the publishing consolidation, the scholarly conformity, but the subservience is more invisible as subservience because it has been naturalized as so-called aesthetic judgment and individual genius. Show don’t tell — and if you tell, don’t be too explicit or too bold politically — is administered as universal craft principle. The retreat into historical distance, fantasy, cool irony, cynicism, nihilism, or privileged observation is celebrated as literary sophistication rather than scorned as the bankruptcy of direct and expansive consciousness it too often represents. The canonical tradition calls this maturity. Realistically speaking, debased conformity would not be too harsh.

The result is a literary culture that is more completely subservient than Hollywood or CNN because its subservience feels like freedom — the freedom of the sensitive individual to dramatize their inner life with exquisite precision, the freedom of the literary craftsperson to choose the right word, the freedom of the independent press to publish what is basically a shadow of the constrained commercial market. Every instance of the subservience is experienced by readers and writers as the natural condition of serious literary production. That’s what makes American literary subservience so complete and so durable — not the police state banging at the door. The police state banging at the door exists too — plenty of that is going on. But the more complete constraint is internal, an internalized chokehold, the lobotomy of literary teaching, the so-called aesthetic education that is imperial pedagogy, imperial politics codified as neutral craft principles and said to be literary quality and freedom.

The battered and buried tradition of the people’s suppressed liberatory literature shows what the subservience cost, in buried novels and buried possibility, the literary compounding that didn’t happen, the tradition that should have deepened across generations and was prevented from doing so by one of the most thoroughly enforced and often disguised systems of cultural control in American history. More successfully disguised than Hollywood. More successfully disguised than the news media. More successfully disguised than the political system. Literature is disguised as the one domain where the American imagination is most free. The end result is a literary culture that constantly lobotomizes itself in the name of literary merit and artistic freedom.

Isaac Kolding at Amateur Criticism indirectly gets at some of this in his recent post upon newly gaining his PhD in literature at the University of Buffalo: “Whither the Funk: some reflections on academia, on the way out.” But the problem in academia as in literature is an order of magnitude greater than he explores. He mourns the “de-funkification” of literary academia — the eccentric replaced by the “well-hydrated high performer,” the boldness and imaginative daring replaced by institutional conformity. There is some historically surface accuracy to these points, and the honesty of his own willingness to conform to fit in is remarkable, but the reality is that the funkiest academics in Leslie Fiedler’s Buffalo days — Fiedler very much included — were operating within a framework that had already suppressed the greatest achievements and the greatest tradition in American literature, never fully revived and so scarcely advanced, let alone institutionalized.

That said, with his newly minted PhD and accomplished Substack, Kolding is in a solid position to fake it until he makes it, or to do what Edward Said explained he did, perform until he could reform. That is, Said fully embraced the depoliticized tenets of New Criticism in his scholarly production until he achieved a position where he had more freedom — that he was able to use far more than most — to move headlong into engaged liberatory academic production and other work.

Meanwhile the literary lobotomy wreaks its devious work, and American literature is the cultural expression most oblivious to its own evisceration and incapacity.

The canonical tradition mistakes its chains for its wings. The writers most formed by the imperial apparatus are the ones most certain they are free. The MFA graduate who has internalized every constraint as craft principle, the prize committee that has naturalized every ideological judgment as aesthetic standard, the scholar who has mistaken the suppression for the natural order of literary value — none of them experience themselves as subservient. They experience themselves as serious. That is the lobotomy’s most complete achievement — incapacity as freedom.

The American literary establishment is the most thoroughly brainwashed cultural institution in the country and the least aware of it. Hollywood knows it is selling product. The news media knows it is managing access. The political class knows it is serving donors. The literary establishment alone believes it makes aesthetic judgments free of the ideological interests that choke it. A culture that cannot name its own chains cannot imagine breaking them. American literary fiction cannot imagine breaking them. Literature is the last place one should find death of the imagination, but that’s what the suppression of the people’s liberatory tradition created — burial of the people’s hearts and minds and imaginations, burial of the full possibility of what literature can do, and what it is for.

The most brainwashed person in any system is the one who has mistaken the system’s requirements for their own desires. American literary fiction has been doing this for a century. It is both habitually and ideologically enforced — durable stuff. Knowing this won’t help him get a job, but academics like Kolding don’t need to accept this ultimately, not when they have put themselves in position to head-fake the system or feed it what it wants until they can more readily figure out and feed the world what it needs.

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The American scene of the same decade was not a provincial outpost of Parisian modernism. It was a parallel and superior achievement — more diverse, more formally serious, more politically alive, more consequential for what literature can do and should do than anything the Paris little magazines produced. Where the Paris scene published Hemingway’s early stories and the later work of Joyce, the American scene provided something the canonical modernist tradition never achieved — an engaged and counterhegemonic and organic dispossessed consciousness in art, literature, and life that was the greater achievement both formally and politically. Writers came from all across the diverse continent and world to the American epicenter of literary production — New York City, especially Harlem, and the Mid-Atlantic region — just as writers from around the world converged on Paris, but in America, they produced something Paris never produced or never celebrated. The suppression of that achievement has been so complete that its absence from the canonical story of modernism feels like the natural order of things rather than like the result of a deliberate institutional suppression that inverted the American literary canon. That inversion is what The Big Bang They Buried argues and documents.

For my money the greater literary creation happened in the Harlem Renaissance and the Mid-Atlantic seaboard that produced the greatest efflorescence of American literature in history, especially in the American novel in the fourteen months between January 1929 and February 1930 (and in more expanded form from 1928 to 1936). There was some modest overlap with Parisian or European modernism but a far more engaged, dispossessed, diverse, and populist literature of first-rate accomplishment was created that should displace Parisian modernism as canonical literature. Were “the stars to align” again of any given literary scene, I would hope they align far more as an outgrowth of the 1920s hearty yet suppressed American engaged literary scene rather than the celebrated formalist Parisian one.

The literary and cultural infrastructure for the greatest concentrated achievement in the novel was largely American: The Masses, The Liberator, The Messenger, Opportunity, Fire!!, The New Masses — and The Crisis, which reached 100,000 readers at its peak, dwarfing every Paris little magazine combined. Jessie Redmon Fauset, The Crisis’s literary editor from 1919 to 1926, midwifed the New Negro literature into being — publishing Hughes, McKay, Larsen, and others before their books existed, and earning from Hughes the tribute that she was one of three people who made the whole tradition possible. These magazines published Claude McKay, Agnes Smedley, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Wallace Thurman, Mike Gold, and Fauset herself, an incisive novelist — writers who produced in the 1920s a body of work more formally and politically serious and alive than anything the Paris little magazines produced in the same decade. The concurrent and subsequent suppression of the American scene — the Red Scares, the New Critics, the Armed Services Editions, the CIA’s cultural operations, the MFA ideology, cultural cold war in general — separated the core productions of these two scenes, elevating one as universal literary achievement and burying the other completely for decades, and at best marginalizing what should be central thereafter.

The canonical writers — Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck — built their careers through an entirely different infrastructure: Scribner’s and Maxwell Perkins in New York, the Paris little magazines, the major commercial publishers. Some, like Hemingway and Dos Passos, contributed pieces to the socialist magazines, but their canonical careers depended on a different institutional home entirely. The Big Bang writers had no such alternative. The socialist and Harlem Renaissance magazines were their primary and often only infrastructure. There was no Maxwell Perkins for Gold or Smedley or McKay, no Scribner’s contract, no Armed Services Edition distributing their novels to 140 million soldiers, no New Criticism promoting their works. On the contrary. When their infrastructure was suppressed, they were suppressed with it, and the canonical tradition inherited and further propagated a literary landscape already shaped by a burial its imperial institutional and ideological mechanisms willfully and purposefully enforced, then habitually performed.

The American scene also produced the greater criticism — most importantly in the magazines and anthologies themselves, in some progressive scholarly works, and in the Black critical tradition not least. W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1926 essay “Criteria of Negro Art” argued directly that all art is political and that the separation of aesthetic judgment from political consciousness is itself an ideological operation — a claim the New Critics would spend the next two decades systematically suppressing. Vernon Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought — written from the west coast, outside the eastern canonical establishment — was the decade’s most ambitious critical reckoning with American literature, a progressive materialist literary history that the New Critics and Trilling subsequently attacked and marginalized as representative of everything wrong with politically engaged criticism and literature. The deliberate depoliticization of aesthetic judgment — imperial politics dressed as neutral craft principle — was the institutional mechanism by which the American scene’s greatest achievements were made invisible as achievements. Both the criticism and the literature were suppressed and marginalized ideologically and institutionally simultaneously.

The full account of what the socialist and Harlem Renaissance magazines and their scene produced in America in the 1920s and what was done to destroy it is the story of The Big Bang They Buried, which I’m serializing on Substack. And what is that full account, when condensed from a book to a paragraph or three? Something like this:

In the fourteen months of the American literary Big Bang between January 1929 and February 1930, six organic dispossessed writers — Claude McKay, Agnes Smedley, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Wallace Thurman, and Mike Gold — produced the greatest concentrated achievement in the American novel, soon followed by H.T. Tsiang and D’Arcy McNickle. That Hemingway, Wolfe, and Faulkner also published novels in that same fourteen month timespan — novels since canonized rather than buried, for reasons this argument documents — does not change the assessment. The Big Bang novels were formally serious, politically explicit, and organically inside the material they dramatized — inhabiting the dispossessed consciousness without exit, often counterhegemonic in expression, combining personal experience and structural analysis in ways the canonical tradition never achieved. Such was the literary Big Bang. It was then suppressed — not by accident or aesthetic judgment but by the correct functioning of the imperial cultural apparatus. The suppression was a political and cultural, ideological, psychological, and intellectual attack simultaneously.

The Red Scares destroyed the socialist publishing infrastructure. The New Critics claimed to depoliticize aesthetic judgment while actually politicizing it to imperial standards, thereby establishing its universal so-called craft principles. The Armed Services Editions distributed 140 million canonical paperbacks to soldiers while omitting the Big Bang tradition entirely. The CIA funded the cultural Cold War that institutionalized the canonical hierarchy globally. The Big Bang novelists were forcibly bankrupted in their careers and directly persecuted by the state — Smedley imprisoned and exiled, Hughes hauled before Congress and forced to recant. And the MFA industrialized the canonical tradition’s aesthetic falsifications as universal pedagogy, producing organic incapacity in writers who might otherwise have continued the suppressed liberatory people’s tradition of literature. The canonical writers — Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Wolfe, along with James and Wharton and the like — were elevated as the summit of American literary achievement. The Big Bang writers were buried so completely that nearly a century later most educated American readers have never or scarcely heard of their novels or have no way of knowing what should be their central, core positions in the canon — as the canon. The result to aesthetics, art, and literature, culture and society, politics and consciousness, psychology and imagination is about as devastating as is possible to conceive.

That may be about as full an account of the literary Big Bang as can be made in brief. Paris was already displaced as the literary capital of the world by the late 1920s when it thought it was at the peak — more than a decade before Europe blew itself up during World War Two. Its actual cultural importance, though not its continuously celebrated reputation, was surpassed by a combination of the Harlem Renaissance and the American and international socialist upsurge of the early twentieth century. It is long since time to reorient American and western literary understanding to that pivotal and badly disfigured and historically disguised reality.

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What Built the Argument — A Personal Essay

Busy week of biography. Got my son graduated from college, and moved. I’m proud to say that at senior night a younger teammate described him as “kind, empathetic, and intentional with maintaining relationships,” among many other kind words, and “the backbone of the distance team, our beating heart, and the air that we breathe.” Soon on to grad school.

And now, here, back to my own college and earlier life experiences that help explain how I arrived at this understanding of American literature that I call the literary Big Bang theory.

The Story Behind the Argument — A Personal Essay

I had been reading the literary criticism of the American socialist era for decades before I read most of the novels that this project argues are the greatest American literature ever produced. The criticism of the Old Left was more accessible to an independent researcher working outside institutional channels than the imaginative work the criticism discussed. Or an effect of an education system that requires far more research and analytic writing than imaginative work. Or an effect of my own personality — a researcher’s instinct preceding and often dominating the artist’s, despite novels I’ve written outnumbering the critical books. Meanwhile, the great populist novels of the American literary Big Bang had been buried so thoroughly that someone focused on exploring and writing in the tradition still had to make a furious determined search to find them — and I wasn’t even searching for them specifically. I was searching for greater consciousness in literature, for critical and imaginative works that achieved what everything I had read and lived and written had always demanded. The Old Left literary criticism, the engaged populist novels of the Big Bang, and the people’s liberatory tradition across time were what that search found.

The sequence of discovery matters, I think. I spent decades reading the criticism of the socialist literary tradition more thoroughly than the imaginative work itself, coming to understand the suppression machinery but not as well as I did upon fully encountering what it had suppressed. All the while, I was writing liberatory socially engaged fiction that preceded my reading the criticism by a full decade. I wrote a micro-fiction about a dying homeless man, based on a real figure in the nearby town when I was sixteen. Titled “The Two Greatest Gifts,” the man and an abandoned puppy freeze to death after taking shelter together from a snowstorm under the town Christmas tree on Christmas eve. This was the result of an English class assignment that was published in the county weekly newspaper. The story offended some but mainly inspired others, both inside and outside my family.

Literature and creative writing were formally only a minor part of my undergraduate years, though central to everything else I was doing. Then during the MFA program in grad school and thereafter, the left criticism was easier to find than the left novels — an effect of the suppression, the education system, or my personality. I had known and greatly appreciated Langston Hughes’s poetry because some of his poetry had been belatedly partially canonized, but I did not know his novel Not Without Laughter or was led to overlook it by all kinds of establishment mechanisms of suppression. Similarly Claude McKay. A bit of his poetry was canonized, much buried, including the anti-imperial “The White House” — retitled “The White Houses” in at least one early anthology to avoid political retaliation, an editorial move that infuriated McKay, as would befit a poem with a line “sharp as steel with discontent.” The Red Summer of 1919 produced some of the most powerful verse in the American tradition, and this poetry led me eventually to his novels, Home to Harlem and Banjo. Home to Harlem the popular hit upon publication and Banjo the anti-imperial tour de force of the two. I had read Nella Larsen’s Passing years earlier without being as fully impressed as I would become — until I better understood the organic dispossessed position, at which point I found it a biting marvel, the same novel producing a different literary experience entirely once a conceptual and social understanding existed to illuminate it. That transformation — the same text, the same reader, the different knowledge producing the recognition a lack of knowledge prevented — is a personal demonstration of what the suppression does to readers and writers, and what its reversal makes possible.

I taught Banjo in an advanced creative writing seminar at West Virginia University alongside excerpts from Les Misérables, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow, and Leslie Marmom Silko’s “Yellow Woman,” and other counterhegemonic works more than a decade before the Big Bang framework existed to name what I was doing. I had the appreciation and intuition that this was among the most formally serious and most alive literature available before I had the theory that would eventually explain why. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I first read Jews Without Money. And it wasn’t until this past year that I came across Daughter of Earth, and then shortly thereafter, in a kind of incandescent determined search, the other Big Bang novels in rapid succession.

The discovery of Smedley crystallized a lot. Not because Daughter of Earth was the last piece of evidence but because it was the most undeniable. Daughter of Earth coalesced a new reality for understanding literature and consciousness and society. Daughter of Earth, like each of the other Big Bang novels in their own way, is an unmistakable achievement. It’s formally serious and politically explicit, counterhegemonic, and organically inside the material it dramatized and analyzed, published in 1929, effectively unknown to the vast majority of educated American readers nearly a century later — or badly overlooked — both inside and outside the academy. The suppression was so complete that someone who had spent thirty years in the Old Left critical tradition still needed a specific act of reading to find what should have been in the foundation of American literary education all along. That’s the suppression’s most complete operation and enforcement. And the reason this essay exists. In 1934 when Malcolm Cowley as literary editor of the New Republic requested from leading writers their lists of overlooked books, only one, John Dos Passos, suggested Daughter of Earth, and he misremembered the title as Woman of Earth and damned it with mixed praise:

An uneven but impressive I suppose autobiographical narrative of a young woman’s life in a Western mining camp and in New York.

And so it goes.

The conceptual and creative development that helped me create the Big Bang theory required some lucky breaks and took three active decades to build, entirely outside the institutional channels that would have prevented the conclusion. It’s worth tracing — not as autobiography for its own sake but as a demonstration that the Big Bang theory required this specific creation of consciousness and experience that could not have been produced from entirely inside the institutions this essay indicts.

Think about it. Imagine working in the canonical veins as an imaginative creator or scholar and reaching these conclusions or arriving at this particular sort of consciousness. How could you? Perhaps if you had been diligently counterhegemonic in scholarship and both counterhegemonic and organically socially engaged in imaginative writing. Well, that’s what I was independently, forcibly so, and it led to no path into the field. In fact it was pointedly discouraged and smeared all the way through. And in general still is.1

I grew up in an impoverished rural county on what was left of the temporarily abandoned family farmstead in northern Pennsylvania — the same regional space that produced Scott Nearing, fired from his university position in Penn’s renowned Wharton School of Business on the eve of World War One for opposing war and the capitalist system. Scott and his wife Helen went on to build the counter-institutional organic life of small-house-building and truck farming as documented in Living the Good Life. Helen and Scott Nearing’s book sat on my parents’ shelves. My father’s father who lived nearby had an eighth grade education with English as a second language and worked as a plumber and delivered propane gas and ran a small hardware store simultaneously in a tiny mountaintop town, the coal and lumber long since exhausted, while my father went all the way through Penn State for a PhD in materials science that enabled him to eventually hold numerous patents for developing X-ray intensifying screens for breast cancer diagnosis. He worked most of his career for DuPont — in a massive plant on the Susquehanna River, thirty miles distant, that also manufactured a lot of material for the military. Lifelong chemical exposure there eventually gave him Parkinson’s disease and dementia that killed him in his mid-seventies. He was laid off before he wanted to retire, not knowing he was being poisoned to death. His job provided enough economic stability to keep us from the worst of the rural poverty that surrounded us, though not enough to insulate us from it entirely. My mother sold antiques from the unpainted 1842 blackened-board, double-plank house next to our old farmhouse that the family built around the time of the Civil War. I wrote a family history of the farmstead from the early 1800s to the present recounting the family highs and the lows, including death by runaway horses of my great-great-great grandfather and death by lightning strike in the kitchen of my great-great grandfather, both personal and economic tragedies that destabilized the family finances for generations. When I was in high school, my father and two of his colleagues were nearly killed in a head-on car crash, when a night worker from the DuPont plant, driving home down the mountain, fell asleep at the wheel. DuPont had cameras at its gates and would fire employees who did not wear their seat belts — a policy that may have spared three lives that day, though not extended hospital stays. The empire sometimes does good things but only in its own interests. It helped keep my father alive on the one hand, to keep its insurance and death benefits costs down, while it slowly, invisibly, and gruesomely killed him on the other. A lot of people and a lot of things are killed slowly, invisibly, and gruesomely, literary things included.

Before any theoretical framework existed to name what I was seeing and writing, I had already created it in story, in “The Two Greatest Gifts” and in “On the Mountain,” written as an undergraduate at Penn State, included later in Texas MFA:

What I knew but did not understand growing up in Saquick County Pennsylvania is that the county is part of Appalachia, that we called it “the mountain,” that I had classmates who lived in a cabin through winter with only a woodstove for heat, no electricity, a deer strung up for food, no parents either, that the little county was part of the United States, barely, and that much of the United States was part of the United States barely, that something was really wrong but we all said the Pledge of Allegiance anyway, that to do so was nationalistic, that one student, Emma, who wore beaded jeans was shy and awkward, that she had permission from her parents to not say the Pledge of Allegiance, and she didn’t, that Jenna was not baptized and we were all shocked at how matter-of-fact she was telling us, that school made people hate each other and it was the law, that the Amish got away with stuff the rest of us did not, that corporations brought almost no money into the county and took almost all of it away, or more than all, that to be Catholic meant you were Christian too, that Maggie was kidnapped by her mother, twice, but they got her back each time, that Andy had no food in the house, which he had to tell the teacher in front of the whole class after she yelled at him for not having his books covered, that he said he didn’t have any covers, that the teacher said well grocery bags then, that he snapped back he didn’t have any grocery bags either because there was no food in the house and he didn’t know when his parents were coming home, that Andy was the smartest kid in the grade, that Andy never graduated, that every single kid was white, that you could be hit so hard in the shoulder in the hall by a kid five years older than you that you lost consciousness before you hit the wall but regained it after you bounced off, that poverty existed big time, that my parents had escaped it, that almost all the coal had been taken away and the money with it, that all the virgin trees had been cut and all the indigenous forced out or killed, that there were little more than a dozen people per square mile, that the deer-to-person ration was nearly three-to-one before hunting season, two-to-one after, that a single stoplight flashed bright yellow at night, that it seemed to flash in warning and peace, that what we meant in high school by getting off the mountain was leaving the county for fast food and a movie and the rest of the world and what all we did not know but wanted to, that the forest, streams and small mountains could charm but also cast spells, that nothing in life of itself was everything, that my grandmother once lived nearby in what were now ghost towns…this is what I knew but did not understand growing up in Saquick County Pennsylvania.…

As valedictorian of my small rural high school I gave a graduation speech about concrete ways to improve the educational experience there. My prosecutorial civic voice had arrived early, before any theoretical framework existed to name it. I had also written the locally published organic dispossessed-adjacent short story two years before, then went to Penn State with almost no political understanding whatsoever, other than that of imperial establishment ideology, knowing nothing about politics and thus heavily influenced by the manufactured affect of the televised spectacle. I arrived in 1988 and immediately voted for George Bush for President because he had better vibes than Dukakis. That’s where my political formation began — at zero — having received the typical business-ruled, socialist-crushed indoctrination of capitalist imperialism forced upon rural America.2

Politically for me, things would quickly change, because I had already begun breaking with religion, Catholic, that I was raised in, and the conventional schooling that I was educated in, and other norms before arriving at college, which accelerated that process — though not quickly enough to affect my first political votes and understanding after two months on campus.

My undergraduate degree after cycling through a variety of majors in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities wound up being a Bachelor of Arts in General Arts and Sciences — a multidisciplinary field spanning three individually selected emphases: in my case, Economics, Creative Writing and Literature, and especially Science, Technology, and Society (STS). What STS meant in practice was well over a dozen courses and seminars of progressive or “radical” institutional critique across virtually every discipline — politics, sociology, psychology, history, science and technology, nutrition, anthropology, geography and land use, personal relationships, ecology and agriculture, architecture, and arts that resulted in a convergence and accumulation of simultaneous demonstrations from multiple directions that the establishment imperial systems were criminal and that real alternatives existed and were scalable across societies.

I was amazingly fortunate to have Ivan Illich as a leading teacher throughout my undergraduate years. The STS program brought him and his colleagues and grad students to Penn State each year for half a year, and the STS courses in general were primary to my understanding of the world. I took multiple courses co-taught by Ivan Illich and Penn State’s leading scientist Rustum Roy, and other courses and seminars taught by Ivan Illich and Barbara Duden. Illich was the groundbreaking social critic who wrote Deschooling Society (1971), Tools for Conviviality (1973), Medical Nemesis (1974), H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness (1985), and ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (1988), among other philosophic works and psycho-social analyses that I inhaled immediately. He argued that modern institutions systematically destroy the capacities they claim to cultivate and transform human consciousness and perception in the process. He showed that establishment schooling produces ignorance, the medical system produces illness, the legal system produces injustice, industrial tools and technologies produce the destruction of convivial human skill and autonomy, the medicalization of water produces the erasure of its cultural and imaginative meaning, and the alphabetization of consciousness produces the colonization of vernacular speech and thought by the literate establishment’s managed categories. He shows that each institution generates the opposite of its stated purpose, and that the counterproductivity is not accidental but structural, and the damage deepens in proportion to the imperial institution’s expansion and prestige.

Illich did not grade our coursework because he quite sensibly did not believe in grading, though Penn State did, quite imperially. His seminars operated on a different principle entirely, the teacher as co-inquirer rather than as credentialing authority, the Gramscian distinction between the organic and the traditional intellectual enacted as pedagogy. Barbara Duden’s work on the history of women’s bodily self-knowledge documented how medical and institutional discourse colonizes organic experience and replaces it with managed categories. She brought the same institutional critique into the history of science and the history of the female body. They all taught with great passion or humor and great life. Together their seminars gave me a big part of the theoretical perspectives that would become, more than thirty years later, the Big Bang theory’s central argument about the MFA system — that it doesn’t merely exclude the socially engaged dispossessed people’s tradition but produces organic incapacity in writers, the lobotomy or brainwashing performed as pedagogy.

And so I took courses with Rustum Roy, a key force in the growth of STS, who was keen to see science and technology integrated ethically into society. I took Larry Spence’s courses on political theory and social thinking, one of which included John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems (1927). Dewey argues that democratic consciousness requires the restoration of local communal life, the thick mutual recognitions and knowledge that industrial capitalism and remote mass organization destroy. Spence hired me to audit one of his courses and critique it weekly in his office, another unusual example of organic collaborative education.

I took a course and an individual study also with philosopher Leonard Waks, fresh off his involvement in the 1990 faculty strike at Temple University, a philosopher who twenty-five years later would found the Dewey Studies journal. He taught a course involving a medley of philosophers and critics of establishment education, the interdisciplinary kind of institutional critique common in most STS sources.

A geography professor whose name I forget ran a course demonstrating that every country could feed itself given an ecological and democratic shift in food production systems. Other professors ran courses tracing the social impact of the history of science and technology on human values and ideologies.

I took an environmental science and design course with a scientist who showed us around his personally designed solar house. He emphasized both its flaws and its successes. At least half a dozen professors invited us students into their homes, most of which were design extensions of their teachings.

This included most notably Barbara Anderson — who had apprenticed with Helen and Scott Nearing in Maine with her partner Len Siebert. Helen wrote the third volume of the Living the Good Life series at Barbara’s little farmstead near Penn State, which Barbara edited. She led a course with Len called “Alternatives in STS” that brought in new speakers each week who lived alternative lifestyles, whether in farming, eating, loving, housing, politics, economics, energy, and so on: organic farmers, intentional community builders, radical organizers, people who had built their lives outside or alongside establishment institutional channels. I took courses and workshops with Barbara and with Len, built an alternative housing small-is-beautiful yurt with them, attended a hands-on class at Dorothy Blair’s house in the nearby Julian Woods intentional community during a course with Blair. She worked extensively internationally among the impoverished and lived in or along the local intentional community, where she housed people in another alternative wooden yurt structure, the counter-institutional life enacted as daily practice rather than as theoretical position.

I took a culturally critical political science course with the progressive populist political science professor James Eisenstein, then with an STS economics professor attended the innovation in science panels at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Washington DC in the early 1990s as part of a grad course that I took as an undergrad. I wore the suit to DC that my mother had insisted I take to college, one of the only times I wore it and spent the first days on my own that I’d ever spent in any city. Exciting as it was, I literally trembled with relief when our van back to Penn State entered the forested sections of road away from the city. I had learned somewhere along the way that cities beyond a certain size have no advantages in civilized living over smaller cities. At a massive scale, disadvantages are more common.

At Penn State I learned early to take professors rather than courses, while attending whatever talks and seminars the most radical and forward-looking faculty offered or visiting speakers presented and skipping conventional courses when something more worthwhile was available. And as it necessarily happened, I got a lot of my geopolitical education from reading the voluminous left works of political dissident Noam Chomsky, who I discovered only via an interview in a Rolling Stone magazine that I picked up in a barbershop, during one of the last haircuts I ever got. Maybe the last. The Penn State political science department would teach Dewey on the fringe but not Chomsky at all.

Before entering the MFA program I had also become convinced, having read arguments pro and con, that Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, was the actual author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare. The Oxfordian case was overwhelming on the evidence and the Stratfordian defense was maintained by institutional authority and credentialed dismissal rather than by the evidence itself. The canonical establishment’s response to the authorship question — ridicule and exclusion rather than engagement, the weight of institutional prestige deployed against the argument rather than the argument engaged on its merits — was an inflection point for everything this essay argues about how the American fake canon is enforced. The most celebrated name in the English literary tradition is itself a canonical fraud maintained by institutional authority rather than evidence — which turns out to be exactly the same mechanism the American canonical hierarchy uses to enforce its so-called aesthetic judgments. The one case does not prove the other, but both are instances of the same type of institutional fraud and imperial suppression. The Big Bang theory is the American version of the De Vere as Shakespeare argument. The canonical attribution is wrong. The establishment’s investment in it is ideological rather than aesthetic, artistic, or literary. The suppression is enforced by prestige and institutional ideology rather than by engagement with the evidence.

In January 1991 during my junior year at Penn State I walked through the student center — the Hetzel Union Building — the HUB — and watched the bombs fall on Baghdad on a bank of screens above the room. Wolf Blitzer was reporting live for CNN while hiding under a desk in an office building in Baghdad while the American bombing happened around him. This was the institutional media’s physical enactment of the imperial observer position — the civic establishment mode of journalism, the public horror managed into spectacle, the reporter sheltering under his desk while narrating the destruction from a position of comparative imperial safety. No one in the student center seemed much interested in the spectacle or affected by it. I was sickened. The gap between what I was watching and what the institutional culture was enacting as normal was one of many moments when the system’s criminal operations become visible, or should become visible, as criminal operations rather than as the natural order of things. Wolf Blitzer under his desk while Baghdad was blown up and burned around him — that image has never left me. Three years earlier I had voted for the man ordering those bombs based on nothing but vibes. Imperial ideology and culture had done its devastating work.3

By 1992 I voted for the odious Bill Clinton. I was far to the left of him but knew the Republican Baghdad bomber George Bush was even worse, and it would be one or the other. After that I was never in a state where my Presidential vote mattered, so deep red Republican were they — Texas, then West Virginia — and so I voted for the most progressive candidate available, no Democrat or Republican, Ralph Nader with the Green Party a couple times. Then I wrote in far leftists or progressive Bernie Sanders as a symbolic act. Imperial choice means little or no choice.

Literature and creative writing courses were tame at both Penn State and during the MFA program at Southwest Texas State compared to the “radical” interdisciplinary STS courses during undergrad. The main benefit of the creative writing courses was that they allowed a kind of open and free creation, though of course passively constrained by all the surrounding imperial ideology. Some valuable exercises sometimes but mostly write what you want. I was fortunate to take a writing workshop course with James Morrow at Penn State a few years after he published his novel This Is the Way the World Ends, in which the Unadmitted, who could not be born due to nuclear holocaust, put humanity on trial by the standards of the Nuremberg proceedings. Talk about a prosecutorial narrative approach. Very appropriate, engaged, explicit, contemporary, and engaging. Though it was pitched as literary fiction it was more or less dismissed in literary circles and embraced by the sci-fi community, nominated for a Nebula Award — the imperial ideological suppression working its way and shaping Morrow’s career from thereon:

Although This Is the Way the World Ends (Henry Holt, 1986) was marketed initially as a mainstream novel, the science-fiction community embraced it, giving Morrow his first Nebula Award nomination. The plot is driven by "The Unadmitted," a ghostly race of potential humans who never got to be born, due to nuclear holocaust. Determined to use their earthly tenures wisely, the unadmitted put the surviving architects of Armageddon—including the novel's everyman protagonist—on trial under the Nuremberg precedent.

I told him at an author meet-and-greet in the student bookstore, which almost no one seemed to show up to, that I would have changed the ending of his novel, slightly. He smiled, slightly. His ending was more sophisticated, as I recall, mine more dramatic — the surviving protagonist doesn’t ride off on snowmobile across the ice to nowhere, as in his version, but instead plunges into a crevice, as in mine. His ending seemed safer, more ambiguous, mine more pointed, more jarring. I guess I always want more point. More jar.

Morrow’s career thereafter moved entirely into science fiction — the prosecutorial civic consciousness that produced the Nuremberg premise too explicit and too engaged for the mainstream literary world that had initially tried to market him, redirected into a genre category that allowed the work to exist without requiring the literary establishment to take its political seriousness seriously.

My senior year, Jennifer Jackson taught a good course on “culturally critical” novels that included The Terrible Twos, White Noise, Tracks, A Confederacy of Dunces, Continental Drift, Vineland, World’s End, and a handful of other such novels. In my final paper for the course, Spring of 1992, I came to the following conclusion4:

Contemporary novelists share many of the weaknesses of contemporary, so-called postmodern, critics. As Kellner and Best claim in Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations:

Reading White Noise and the other novels intensifies the daily inhospitable cultural experience. In a way, it is good art. In another way, it is like ingesting rat poison. Russell Bank’s Continental Drift is somewhat like White Noise in its understated, angrier way. While moments of tragedy in White Noise are encountered within webs of ironic energy, Continental Drift is more of a linear sad depiction of life, a gloomy human line drawn as if through a bleak landscape with the skulls and bones of dead animals strewn about. T. C. Boyle’s World’s End, extremely visual and metaphoric, is about a young man, Walter, who crashes against the bad tides of history, his own blood history and others’. It is a story about property conflict, ownership and tenancy, and those who must live with its crippling legacy. The legacy is near total tenancy in the present day where there are still the two classes—the owners and the owned—as if there is no functioning alternative, nothing independent or communal and cooperative, even in part. These works are bleak to the hilt and seemingly free of independent, progressive insight, let alone drama. Dominant institutionalized forces need not feel threatened.

And so the establishment English training ran alongside and often against the progressive or radical STS training throughout. People are conventional on establishment terms not by choice but by default. People want to be free and wholly alive. Instead, much convention traps them, starves them, infects them. And where they are partly free, they may be weakened or vulnerable. There is no point in literature mainly reflecting the oppression. It should largely illuminate liberatory moments and mechanisms, liberatory struggle against oppression, individually and collectively, all the while condemning oppression in explicit, contemporaneous, unmistakable terms, or it is a dead man walking. The full paper is in the footnote below, since it documents the argument more precisely than any summary could.5

This final paper of my undergraduate years contained the Big Bang theory in embryo, the argument more or less fully formed at twenty-two. The prosecutorial voice, the distinction between necessary-but-insufficient cultural critique and the full structural indictment, the demand for fiction that shows the imperial system as criminal and shows organic dispossessed characters working against it, the Dewey argument about local communal knowledge, the Chomsky argument about libertarian socialist transformation — all of it is here, thirty-four years before the Big Bang theory fully laid it out. The paper has the argument but lacks the revolutionary anti-imperial literary tradition that would have confirmed and better revealed it, because it wasn’t taught, if even known.

Where are the socially constructive contemporary characters weaving and sharing vibrant life conditions, decidedly, knowledgeably, and experimentally in the process of subverting inhospitable culture, regenerating culture and themselves? They are scarcely to be found in contemporary fiction. They are found nearly everywhere else.

This is the Big Bang theory’s central indictment stated in 1992 without yet knowing that Gold and Smedley and McKay had already answered the question sixty-plus years earlier and been buried.

My critique of White Noise as zombie lit — the observer position rewarded, the system named as oppressive without being named as criminal, the characters offered no exit into structural understanding or organic resistance, a vague gesture to young children as hope — is the canonical indictment that this Big Bang project makes in 2026 applied to a specific canonical novel in 1992. The argument about DeLillo glorying in the spectacle while offering readers no regenerative counterpoint is the organic imperial consciousness that I critique in the neuroscience capsule indictment.6

The 1992 paper cited Rebecca West — a journalist and public intellectual working outside the academic critical establishment — rather than Trilling or Brooks or any of the credentialed canonical authorities to make its argument about the postmodern cultural dead end. A small detail that looks telling in retrospect, since the tradition the paper was searching for would turn out to have Smedley and Larsen at its center and to have been recovered largely by scholars working outside or at the margins of the institutional channels. The instinct toward voices outside the canonical apparatus was present from the beginning.

In a strong sense the argument of the Big Bang theory was complete at twenty-two and waited thirty-four years for the tradition that would confirm it.

The 1992 paper was already asking, in its own terms, where the fiction was that named the imperial system as criminal and showed organic dispossessed characters working against it — without knowing that Gold and Smedley and McKay had already written exactly those novels and been buried — a powerful demonstration of what the suppression did and what its removal can generate.

The liberatory socialist intellectual and ideological grounding was complete, thanks largely to the radical philosophy and interdisciplinary systemic critiques of the STS program and to my discovery of greater dissident politics outside of class, before the liberatory socialist literary tradition was found.7

At Southwest Texas State University’s MFA program — the only school that accepted me with a first-year teaching assistantship, out of six applications8 — my lead professor was Tom Grimes, who held an Iowa MFA, had taught there, edited a collection of Iowa stories, and wrote Mentor, his memoir about longtime Iowa director Frank Conroy. Tom introduced me outside of class to Robert Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise, one of the good counterhegemonic novels in the American tradition — the Central American revolutionary context, the imperial conquest directly exposed, the organic position dramatized with formal seriousness. My second reader professor was Debra Monroe, whose personal essay collections I appreciated especially in their modest sociopolitical moments, and who taught an illuminating course in conventional literary theory throughout history that gave me the canonical critical tradition in its full arc — helpful to understand what the essay would eventually argue the canonical tradition was partly built to prevent. Lydia Blanchard, a D.H. Lawrence expert and Virginia Woolf specialist taught a great Victorian novel course in which the highlight for me was George Eliot’s Middlemarch — Eliot whose literary essay and political analysis “The Natural History of German Life” (1856) makes a pre-Big Bang argument for documentary realism as political obligation — a limitation I’ve shown here as the sympathetically observational civic establishment position stopping short of the structural indictment. Eliot’s essay is useful though for indicating the political power, often debilitating, of custom and habit not least in rural areas — very relevant today.9 My third reader, Mike Hennessey who taught a popular course on James Joyce’s Ulysses, also co-taught a lively history of thought humanities course with a philosophy professor. Tom and Debra had lively literary interests they were open to sharing, including by opening their homes to students for literary gatherings, as did Mike, bringing their literary friends and colleagues and their own knowledge into the world of ideas. I graduated just before Dagoberto Gilb and Tim O’Brien came on board the MFA program and was sorry to have missed them. Out of those years came Texas MFA — Canocanayesatetlo, DIY-published in 2009 — a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman of a young political writer moving through the MFA program at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos as set in the mid 2000s, updated from the 1990s, teaching composition on stipend, and conducting an unauthorized parallel education in the university library and in used books stores after hours in Austin, San Antonio, and in Larry McMurtry’s massive stores in Archer, Texas — reading in hundreds of books of liberatory literary criticism, from Calverton’s Liberation of American Literature to Geismar’s fed-up American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity and his marginalized memoir Reluctant Radical to Bernard Smith’s Forces in American Criticism.10 The young writer seeks what he calls an LMFA, a Liberatory Master of Fine Arts, a degree that does not exist and that the MFA system was built to prevent from existing.

The title gets at the novel’s political argument before the first page. Canocanayesatetlo is the Tonkawa word for the San Marcos Springs — warm water — one of the oldest continuously inhabited sites in North America, now engulfed beneath Spring Lake on the Texas State campus — against the protests of the “Free The Springs!” student movement. The indigenous presence runs eleven thousand years beneath the institutional literary culture built on top of it. The novel’s political consciousness is similarly layered showing the outlaw border crossing at Roma, the scandalous dispossessed colonias of Starr County, the Navajo Dead Broke Man on the tracks outside Gallup, Hurricane Katrina’s abandoned dead. A whole battered imperial society presses against the workshop aesthetic from every direction while the narrator struggles to name what he wants and cannot get: fiction that exposes the establishment culture and social systems and politics as criminal, imaginative story that combines contemporaneous fact and voice and political analysis with organic or counterhegemonic consciousness, or both, that does what Professor X calls laying your life on the line.

This 2009 novel like the 1992 essay that long preceded it is another version of the Big Bang theory in embryo, in both dramatic and discursive form — the argument forming before the tradition that would have confirmed and completed it had been found. The narrator knows the liberatory critical tradition from the library stacks and used bookstores, online and otherwise, but has not yet discovered the full tradition of the liberatory novels themselves. Gold and Smedley and McKay and the Big Bang writers are the answer the novel is looking for. It would take another long stretch of years to find them — and this whole project to fully reveal what the search and efforts had always been working toward and scouting for and creating regardless.

The MFA years were as invaluable as they were frustrating — invaluable for the literary expansion, the engagement with craft and with a wide range of what fiction could do and had done, frustrating because I wanted a socialist literary salon and that is absolutely not what the MFA establishment is or was about. I was writing both conventional and anti-imperial fiction from a broadly left position throughout, and in the latter case without fully knowing or having available the literary tradition I was working within.

After the MFA I went to work for New Party and ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) in Little Rock, Arkansas — housed in an old downtown residence become office building with the community radio station and labor organizers, the counter-institutional infrastructure of the left assembled in one old house. My New Party leader liked Gramsci, told me to read him — I had already — and also liked Joyce’s Ulysses, which I didn’t much care for, for reasons this essay articulates thirty years later. Gramsci in Little Rock was the theoretical framework working in political practice — the organic intellectual concept not as academic category but as description of what we were actually doing, working from inside-out the socio-political material, working the streets, the neighborhoods the community meetings and actions, as detailed in Texas MFA, rather than applying an external framework to it. However, as an outsider coming in, I didn’t feel effective. I thought my position should have gone to a local, as I told my leader there, and I was baffled that it had not. Yes, I was supposed to help organize and train local leaders but this was twenty-five years after ACORN had been founded in Little Rock, and significant local staffing had happened in large part but not wholly. Why? Why were outsiders still being brought in to advance the work? Something wasn’t working, and from what I could tell, it was lack of funding. As soon as local leaders got trained and became effective in various community, financing, and social skills, they got poached by private industry that could pay more than the rock bottom minimum that the community organization could afford. Thus community-building was constantly being broken down by imperial forces, and otherwise politically attacked, to the extent where it eventually was forcibly dissolved altogether.

From Little Rock I went to teach in two high schools on and along the Navajo Nation for a year where there were teaching shortages, in the city of Gallup, New Mexico, and in the small community of Navajo on the reservation. The students were about 80 percent and 100 percent Navajo respectively. I organized a student exchange between the Navajo students and rural Pennsylvania students taught by a family friend — sharing bits of each other’s lives and experiences across the continental distance, an activation of local communal knowledge and cultural exchange that Dewey argued democratic consciousness requires. I walked the red sandstone cliffs of various parks, Canyon de Chelly, and the Chuska mountains. I explored the distressed and ecologically troubled industrial areas, the abandoned warehouses, the coal operations, and uranium mine tailing burial pits not far from the modest modern housing and traditional Navajo hogans near pinyon pine picking grounds. McNickle’s Salish community in The Surrounded was no abstraction after having taught Navajo students and walked those landscapes. During and after grad school I purposely set out to know the peoples of the continent of this country firsthand, and so I experienced various organic positions through direct encounter and interaction with the people and communities whose literary traditions, in part, this Big Bang project explores and helps recover. With the Navajo students I put together an informal mini contemporary history — To Navajo [NM] and Bethel [PA] and Back.

From the Navajo Nation and surrounds I moved to Rio Grande City in Starr County — into the southernmost tip of Texas and one of the lowest income counties in America — to teach English at a remote branch of South Texas Community College for five years. The students I taught were entirely Mexican American, with one exception, a young white woman whose parents she said were hippies. I could see quite a ways into Mexico from my office window, and walking the trails along the Rio Grande I often saw people crossing the river. They were cautious but rarely asked if it was all clear, as they knew better than I did, and in any case they looked far more local than I ever could. I visited Mexico by car and on foot, in both cases crossing the bridge between Roma and Miguel Alemán. For some reason the restaurants in Mexico had fresher tomatoes and higher quality cheese, better pinto beans, in addition to of course less expensive food and medical and dental services.

I scouted the McAllen library for as much Mexican and Mexican American literature as I could find and brought Gloria Anzaldúa’s field work poems and border essays into my classrooms alongside those of Gary Soto, and works by Castillo, Cisneros, Hogan, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Yellow Woman essays and her great short story by the same title, and other Mexican and Native writers, including prison literature — which was substantially Black literature — plus excerpts from Les Misérables, and Whitman’s “Learn’d Astronomer,” Dickinson’s febrile and feminist poems, Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” which reads as counterpatriarchal more than canonical, and whatever international work of the southern hemisphere I could readily access — including Guimarães Rosa’s classic story “The Third Bank of the River.” I leaned on the diverse multicultural anthology, Legacies, which I had been fortunate to be assigned to use as a teaching assistant at SWT in San Marcos while teaching during the MFA program. I helped the South Texas students write and self-publish their own personal narratives — the civic dispossessed tradition in its most immediate pedagogical form, the community’s own consciousness given back to itself in durable form. Long before the Big Bang framework existed I was living its argument in the classroom as best I could, the intuition that the people’s literature was the most alive and most meaningful literature preceding the theory that would fully explain and show how and why. The students created by far their best expressions of consciousness and knowledge and writing in these personal and culturally critical essays.

All of this was the organic position being built through direct encounter — not only reading about dispossession but living alongside it, teaching inside it, bringing its literary expression into classrooms and watching students both recognize themselves and push the bounds of consciousness and knowledge in literature that the canonical tradition had made invisible or marginal. That recognition is what recovery enables and requires, and which liberatory creation must constantly push farther. I saw some of it happen in part in real time in South Texas classrooms years before the Big Bang exploration existed to explain what might be recovered and further created, even as we read canonical classics as well.

All the while I was writing what I think of as liberatory or partisan stories, novels, poetry, criticism, journalism, and eventually scripts and screenplays — mostly DIY published, in addition to mainly DIY editing and publishing similar work of others. My own novels came in sequence, each one a different development of the liberatory fiction argument I had made since just before my MFA years. Ganoga — a contemporary Thoreauvian woods wander, culturally critical, often overtly — came in my late twenties, followed by Youthtopia, a satire of establishment schooling, using many non-fiction footnotes of institutional and counterhegemonic critique. Homefront arrived in 2003, in my early thirties — an explicit contemporary anti-Iraq War novel, counterhegemonic in the most direct sense, referencing the Nuremberg trials, written in real time before and as the American invasion of Iraq happened. In fact, completed by the day of the invasion and later revised. Texas MFA — Canocanayesatetlo followed in 2009. Then a lot of partisan journalism, local activism, liberatory lit blogging, and continued DIY publishing and editing, including a huge liberatory lit anthology, and a couple big works of liberatory criticism. Empire All In came in 2016 — a satiric counterhegemonic novel of Trump and Hillary Clinton and empire — directly out of which grew the Trump and empire satire serialized on Substack in 2024, Loop Day. In the meantime I took a series of remote Hollywood-based screenwriting courses for the first time, relatively intense, and wrote a bunch of revolutionary screenplays and scripts out of which grew the very long novel Most Revolutionary, each section prefaced by engaged literary criticism quotes collected over more than two decades. I serialized Most Revolutionary alongside Loop Day. Every one of these efforts was DIY published, denied institutional channels, not reviewed anywhere — the institutional fate of the work illustrating the argument the work was making.

And so it was that alongside the fiction ran the criticism and the publishing. A short book of criticism11 of James Wood’s How Fiction Works took on establishment criticism directly, which actually was pointedly critiqued, tellingly, by a handful of members of the literary establishment in the heyday of blogging, as I’ve previously shown. Shortly before publication a prominent establishment critic wrote to me privately, taking issue with some criticisms but conceding a few points. We were unable to reach larger agreement, and he insisted that the exchange remain private, which is its own demonstration of how the establishment responds to counterhegemonic criticism it cannot entirely dismiss.

A Practical Policy — a political literary blog, the title a conscious echo of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” — ran for years. I founded a print-on-demand partisan fiction press, editing and publishing Andre Vltchek’s work and others. The Liberation Lit anthology, co-edited with Andre and published in 2010, gathered counterhegemonic and organic dispossessed writers from around the globe including from the American prison system, with contributions from Arundhati Roy and Ernest Callenbach, Marge Piercy, Tamara Pearson, Mark Vallen, Cindy Sheehan, Sister Helen Prejean, Renaldo Hudson, Peter Linebaugh, and many others, and blurbs from Terry Eagleton and Adrienne Rich. I edited and published left novels by Vltchek and Ron Jacobs. A bit of my poetry appeared in The Texas Observer — edited at the time by Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye — and culturally critical short stories in the socialist literary magazine Pemmican before it went defunct, along with work in a few conventional journals, including The South Carolina Review. An online magazine, Liberation Lit, co-founded with Vltchek and Joe Emersberger carried the same project into journalism and political analysis.

Almost all of this was the counter-institutional infrastructure that the Big Bang project argues the recovery of the suppressed tradition requires, built across three decades with whatever resources were available — which were minimal — outside every channel that would have required softening the argument or managing the political content into a “subordinate clause” of imperial canonical literature.

Between semesters of teaching at South Texas Community College, in the summer of 2002 I bought a Greyhound bus pass and traveled through nearly every state in the country, a both grueling and inspiring tour that included some of the most depressed areas — the continental reality of American life experienced from the bus seat and local neighborhoods through vast regions, a continued pan-continental consciousness built through direct encounter with people, on the move, and in their places, through a diversity of American communities and landscapes that the institutional culture’s managed perspective systematically prevents. McKay’s diasporic wandering was possible within the continent — from Mexico to Canada, from city to countryside, to the varied Native lands and communities — the people’s domains no abstraction to an internal migration, crossing the continent by Greyhound on a limited budget seeing and experiencing as much as possible.

Not long afterwards I met my future wife online through a socially conscious dating organization, Concerned Singles, that advertised in the classifieds of a progressive magazine. She was a social justice literature professor originally from mid-southern Appalachia, Kentucky, then advanced degreed in the esteemed universities of the northeast. My northern Appalachian background to her mid-southern — I don’t think either one of us thought about it that way growing up. We experienced more than a few cultural similarities in the different regions. Despite both being raised religious, Catholic, and religious no longer, our son was born at a Catholic nuns’ birthing center in a little building next to a pasture with goats not far from the Mexican border. We moved back to Appalachia where I dove into local activist journalism — writing about city council battles over annexation and lack thereof and forest preservation and school siting, my prosecutorial civic voice now applied to immediate local politics with the same directness that the Big Bang liberatory dispossessed and counterhegemonic tradition applied to the imperial systems’ criminal, underhanded, and impoverishing operations. I pro se sued the school district when they wanted to move my son’s elementary school to a dangerous intersection — lost the lawsuit but generated public attention and documented the violations in detail. I got my permaculture certification through Geoff Lawson’s institute. Permaculture has a similar institutional critique and constructive argument about organic systems applied to the land and community. I taught literature briefly at the university level and through an online leftist website. I took Hollywood screenwriting courses online to learn whatever techniques the well-financed professionals might be keeping to themselves — and found there were some worth knowing.

And throughout all of this, for three decades, I was reading the literary criticism from the broader socialist literary tradition — Goldman, Norris, Sinclair, and the Old Left critics Calverton, Parrington, Smith, Wilson, Farrell, Burke, the New Masses critics — not systematically, because I wasn’t paid to do anything systematically, or at all, but catch-as-catch-can — building the historical and theoretical framework without yet having found and read key novels of the buried imaginative work the framework was meant to illuminate. The Old Left views were incomplete themselves, too slighting of the Harlem Renaissance, too fixated on the engaged white proletarian worker culture. Gold, at the 1935 American Writer’s Congress, wrongly defended use of the symbol “workers,” who were mainly whites, over Kenneth Burke’s insistence on “people” — which included everyone — as if you need to have a job to have human dignity and worth and political capacity. Kenneth Burke gathered the Old Left literary criticism into its most penetrating single collection, The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941), written in the 1920s and 1930s while farming and woodworking in Andover, New Jersey outside of most institutional channels, after serving briefly as editor and music critic of the modernist journal The Dial in the 1920s, and music critic of The Nation in the mid 1930s.12

In any case, the Old Left criticism remained more accessible than the novels, probably because criticism often cross references itself, more so than novels do, and more so than it does to novels, making ideological lines and views and works in criticism easier to find and follow than among novels. And so the suppression weighed heavy. Someone specifically dedicated to recovering the tradition could navigate the criticism more readily than the novels themselves, buried in small press paperbacks and archive obscurity and specialist journals and the subordinate clauses of every authoritative account of American literary history.

So a determined search was required. Then came Daughter of Earth — at which point the Big Bang theory crystallized from thirty years of reading and living and writing into the argument this whole project makes. The discovery felt too large and too contextually dependent for a single article — too much had to be established before the argument’s full import could be conveyed — so I stopped posting literary criticism for six weeks, wrote a long draft of the whole theory, noted publicly what I was doing as I went, and then began this serialization.

I have not been entirely conscious of as much of the formal intellectual history as the informal intellectual history while writing this project. But from Penn State to Southwest Texas State it factored in. Then I leaned hard on self-taught literary history and creation, on thirty years of on-again off-again independent research and production outside institutional channels. I had almost forgotten how deeply the institutional critique dimension of the argument was formed at Penn State across well over a dozen courses in virtually every discipline in my search there for how to live the good life in and against a highly technological, complex, and imperial society. I had all but forgotten about the Bachelor of Arts in General Arts and Sciences with its three-way multidisciplinary focus — made as revolutionary as possible by myself, with a lot of help from the STS interdisciplinary courses, professors, and visiting speakers — STS not yet formed as a formal major, at a land-grant university in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But looking back now the whole thing is visible as coherent — including the book on my parents’ shelf with the actual title, Living the Good Life, by Scott and Helen Nearing — organic intellectuals who built the counter-institutional life the title describes, the valedictorian speech on social and educational improvement, the ironic counterhegemonic interdisciplinary education at Penn State, the Southwest Texas State canonical MFA and my ideological and practical writing struggle inside it, Gramsci being recommended in the streets and neighborhoods of Little Rock, the Greyhound bus exploration across much of the continent, work and life on and around the Navajo Nation and along the Mexican border, the DIY partisan publishing and editing, the pro se lawsuit and the activist journalism and literary blogging, the permaculture and Hollywood training, the thirty years of Old Left criticism without most of the crucial novels at hand, and the determined and sometimes inadvertent search that unexpectedly found them and pieced together what they represent in a long line of American, and world, literature and culture and politics stretching forward and far back. I wasn’t fully aware while exploring and explaining this understanding of American literature these past months how much my own college and other biographical experiences played into it, until this reflection.

The inheritance of the people’s engaged liberatory literature exists. It was stolen from everyone. Giving it back as the new and core canon, the most vital tendency and tradition in literature, the engaged dispossessed people’s literature, counter-imperial literature, is what this project is for. And so now it’s up to people in the know to make of it what they will, what they can.

What the recovery demands, alongside the commentary and research and analysis that this essay represents, is continuation — new liberatory organic dispossessed and counterhegemonic novels written in the living present for the future, exposing the imperial systems and ideologies as criminal in real time, from inside and against their operations, as Gold and Smedley and McKay did in 1929 and 1930.13 This recovery and revival is no ceiling on literature. Far from it. It’s the floor. What the people’s liberatory tradition of literature ultimately demands is not replication but surpassing — new Big Bangs, larger and more numerous and qualitatively novel, written from inside a fuller consciousness of what the rampaging empire has become and what it does to human life and human consciousness, a new liberatory people’s literature of what humanity is and might be, with the people’s buried tradition restored and available rather than lost. The original Big Bang was concentrated, brief, and suppressed before it could compound. What comes next should be expansive in scope, sustained across generations, qualitatively new in what it achieves, and impossible to suppress.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in Decolonising The Mind (1986) and in an interview notes the importance of “culture” and “imagination” in the fight against imperialism, in the effort to be more fully human, free of oppression and exploitation:

The oppressed and the exploited of the earth maintain their defiance: liberty from theft. But the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against that collective defiance is the cultural bomb. The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves; for instance, with other peoples’ languages rather than their own. It makes them identify with that which is decadent and reactionary, all those forces which would stop their own springs of life. It even plants serious doubts about the moral rightness of struggle. Possibilities of triumph or victory are seen as remote, ridiculous dreams. The intended results are despair, despondency and a collective death-wish. Amidst this wasteland which it has created, imperialism presents itself as the cure and demands that the dependent sing hymns of praise with the constant refrain: ‘Theft is holy’. ... The theme of this book is simple. It is taken from a poem by the Guyanese poet Martin Carter ... do not sleep to dream, ‘but dream to change the world’.

...imagination gives our first picture of different worlds. The capacity to picture different possibilities is very, very important for humans, and literature is very, very important in that respect. Authoritarian regimes want to limit the capacity of people to imagine different futures… Literature is important because of its capacity to fire the imagination – and to say we cannot just accept the present conditions. So we need other energies that come and imagine a different world.

The people’s most vital and core literary tradition, liberatory as it is and must be, needs more and better novels, more and better art and culture in general, that achieves something the original Big Bang could not fully achieve, whether because of the suppression cutting it short or because the present demands new forms and new consciousness that the 1929 moment could not anticipate and did not face but which is undeniable to the conscience and consciousness of the present day.

The opening of Homefront (2003):

They were not crowded but grouped comfortably in small formations on the back porch – an impressive lofted plank deck, half a decagon braced across the entire wall of the house and hanging far out over the yard, a bone-breaking drop to the sidehill below.

Farther beyond, the valley fell away into apparent infinity, an impressive view, although what most of those gathered on this commemorative occasion welcomed more was the spring warmth for which they felt gratitude.

They were gathered at the home of Aaron Thompson, who had been killed exactly a year ago during the opening weeks of the US invasion of Iraq.

Soon afterward, Carolyn Thompson had found herself with her husband on the front stoop of the house telling the media assembled on the grass and on the dirt and gravel drive that her soldier son Aaron had died for – “He died for all of us,” she said, when in fact, as she now knew, it would have been far more accurate to say that Aaron had been killed by all of us, that Aaron and the rest of the foot-soldiers had been sent as cannon fodder, however lethal, by the government of the United States and by the powerful corporate forces that drove and staffed and otherwise held large purchase on the government, and that Aaron had been killed by everyone in the US who had let the government, the corporate media and other cheerleaders carry out the illegal and otherwise criminal invasion and occupation of Iraq – an act on the same moral level as that of the conquest of Iraq by Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, nearly 800 years earlier when his invading legions overran the Middle East. This was the way Carolyn understood the context of her son’s death, now.

Carolyn had begun to see the fiction for the fact in the misleading reports on TV, on the radio, and in print, and what was more, she had heard it on her own lips – “He died for all of us.”

She knew better now. Because of. Not for.

What a bitter, nauseous thing it was to Carolyn to learn the barbaric reality of how and why her son had been sent to kill and be killed on criminal grounds by official Americans, many elected, many not elected, who created, supported and directed the invasion. One of those elected officials happened to be family to Carolyn – her first cousin, Senator Sam Washburn, who stood across from Carolyn on the deck today, leaning against the part of the railing below which the ground fell most steeply, as Carolyn could not help but be aware. Senator Sam Washburn stood opposite Carolyn who had placed herself in front of the sliding glass door, the lone entrance to the house.

Carolyn’s youngest daughter Ellen had flown in from college, and Jamie was there, the daughter of the Senator and Ellen’s close friend. Carolyn’s elder children were there as well, Ruthy and Mike who lived nearby, along with their young children playing in the house and traipsing about the yard. Carolyn’s parents had come over too, Joanne and Bernie, as had the reporter from the city paper who interviewed them all, Lynn Jackson. A few neighbors were also in attendance, as was Aaron’s friend from the military, Juan Garza, who had been sitting by Aaron in the Humvee when it was hit by the rocket-propelled grenade that killed Aaron. They were all gathered on the deck today.

And Carolyn thought if you looked hard enough you might even see a few of the Iraqi people standing around – warriors and civilians both – including Iraqi children who might be off playing in the house and yard with the Thompson family children.

Given the deck’s extraordinary height, when the wind on stormy days whipped and the rain lashed and Carolyn had stood at the glass door looking out across the boards this past year, she had felt as if she were riding through some vast and dangerous sea on a giant ship, on the Titanic, it could have been, or a battle cruiser.

When the Senator placed one hand on the top plank of the railing and gestured with his other hand while making a point, Carolyn felt again the reality of the death of her son, the reality that her own country had set him up, the government and the powers that drove the government, not that the government was really her government, not that it much represented what she valued, except fictitiously, she had come to understand more and more.

If her country had not invaded, Aaron would not have been killed, not that she felt it was the country that had invaded, not that it was the people – the people who had been flat lied to and misled and overruled.

If great pains had not been taken to mislead the people of the country, there would have been far less support than even the limited amount that the official liars and manipulators and true believers of a fantasy America in a fantasy world were able to whip up.

And there he stood, Senator Sam Washburn, Carolyn’s first cousin, talking with her husband and some others. He stood across from her now, by the railing, nothing between him and infinity but what might be fragile wooden boards, except that Carolyn knew the wood to be sturdy and protective. Her husband and sons, Mike and Aaron, had built the deck themselves.

The opening of Texas MFA—Canocanayesatetlo (2009):

Geometry deceives; only the hurricane is accurate.
—Victor Hugo

Texas once was Mexico, once indigenous land, part of Turtle Island – indigenous descriptor for the continent. Still is. Texas is Latin America, Anglo America, African America, Indigenous America, Asian America. Texas overlaps. Tejas, Teyas – meaning allies, or friends, or possibly “tough guys.” What cosmic forces might converge at this point on the old Chisholm cattle trail – where Central, South, and East Texas collide?

Here is where Latin America meets Anglo America, meets the US South, US West and US Midwest – in and around the ancient grounds and waters of what is now called San Marcos, where more than 200 springs shoot out from three main fissures and other openings underground within a couple hundred yards of each other – now engulfed at the bottom of Spring Lake, the current visible source of the San Marcos River – the only home of a few unique plant and animal species, including the Texas blind salamander, fishes, and Texas wild rice. The only home.

Past a sign Free the Springs! tacked onto an old elm by a local environmental group, I walked up to Spring Lake where I sat on the bank and stared into the bedraggled reeds of the marsh – full moon burning water. I tried to envision the ancient Springs fully alive pulsing beneath.

I thought of the all-but-invisible encampments of the homeless in the woods downriver. All the oil money in Texas and in the world seem to never do a thing for people in this condition, except to make more of them, by starting wars that destroy entire countries and regions, rendering economies at home and abroad gutted, chaotic, torn.

Traumatized vets take to the wild, forced to hide in the woods of the town, in the woods of the university, in the woods by the forever springs. Welcome to college, son. Now get to class, and pass our tests, and you too can join our ranks.

Canocanayesatetlo – warm water – the name the indigenous Tonkawan people gave to the ancient San Marcos Springs, now called, where emerald water flows rapidly year-round, at a temperature of 72 degrees Fahrenheit, forming the San Marcos River on the campus of Texas State. Water vapor wafting over river, especially during cool months – warm water inviting swimmers and kayakers and tubers year-round. Any rare freeze of air temperature during cool months not uncommonly followed by 70 or 80 degree days or warmer still. Filter feeding fish hover downstream from toes of waders who kick up sand and sediment from river bottom as the fish nibble at bits on skin. Liquid crystal water clear to riverbed. Alligators once roamed the San Marcos Springs, where the water has always flowed in known human history at the least.

Scientists suggest the Springs may be the oldest continuously inhabited site in all of North America – not a bad place to attend a Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing. And if it all comes back to the Springs – this journal, this time here in Texas – it might need be nothing new in American letters but a traditional, coursing vein. William Van O’Connor notes in his introduction to the anthology, The Idea of an American Novel:

As backdrop, and subject too, the American novelist tends to employ something vast, the sky, the prairie, the wilderness, the ocean, war, humanity, and even eternity.

And if the San Marcos Springs of the Edwards Aquifer are not as vast as can be – though the aquifer stretches from Austin south to San Antonio and curves west, running much of the way to the Rio Grande at a spot north of Eagle Pass – and if the river is too small upon which to float an entire novel, well, possibly the Springs and river and surrounds are major enough as the site of ancient human habitation and current highly active, even volatile, migration. No matter that the great river novels of America were written over a century ago – Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin – two tales of a nation divided – the river as fact and symbol of that divide, carrying slaves and slave products. Canocanayesatetlo.

The opening of Empire All In (2016):

Texas? Our Texas? asked Presidential Aide Dineh.

Stupid! Idiot! Losers! The illegals are killing us! I will make America great again! cried President Donbo King Tyrump. He pounded a map on the wall with his fist. It’s destiny!

The Invasion of Texas was on.

The day of his inauguration as President of the United States of America, President Tyrump ordered a map of the world hung on the wall by his desk in the Oval Office.

While killing time between rounds of golf, he showed the map to his Presidential aide, Dineh.

President Tyrump thumped Texas with his fist three times, then once more for emphasis.

This! Dineh! Look! It’s destiny! Manifest! Whatever that means! I will make my America great again! There’s border land there, Dineh, and I’m taking it! Only the Great Wall of Texas will keep the illegals out! I’ll build a border wall mall casino resort and make the big bucks on both sides of the wall! A great big beautiful border wall mall! Never surrender! Remember the Alamo! Damn outlaws! I’ll line the Rio Grande with golf courses and Texas Hold ‘Em poker tables and make it its own long country: Tyrumplandia! Brand Tyrump! We’ll extend the Tyrump wall mall casino and resort all across Earth! It will be a great show! People like shows, Dineh! I know I do! Especially the ones where I star! I love the glitz and glitter, glory and glam! Good times, Dineh! We only have to stop the illegals at the border to make all my dreams come true!

Mr. President, what about the people who already own that border land, Sir? They won’t give it up without a fight. Not for a great wall, or a grand mall, or anything.

Then a fight they will get, Dineh! That’s why we are invading Texas! You start by seizing the land! You bring in guns and take whatever else you might! Take it all if need be! Whatever there is to take, you get! Whatever I need that I don’t already have becomes mine! The border wall is merely the beginning!

Mr. President, there are native tribes along the border that will fight you, I’m sure of it. And some people have land rights going all the way back to Spain, the Spanish land grants, Sir.

So we bomb Spain too, what’s the big deal? And the Natives?! What do they know about fighting for land? Are they any good at it? Why are they still around? Why are the Natives always standing in the way of progress, Dineh?! Have they no respect for the people of this land?! Tell me, Dineh, you’re Native: look how well you adapted to the ways of the world. Why are these throwback Natives trying to stop my rightful rule, trying to destroy my name, blocking my oil and gas pipelines in the Dakotas! Threatening my border wall in the Southwest! Fighting fracking in my Empire State of New York?! Do they ever win?! If they don’t ever win, why do they keep fighting, Dineh?! Tell me!

There’s no fracking in New York state, Sir.

For now! Only for now, Dineh!

The opening of Loop Day (2024):

“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
—Karl Marx

Young and strong, and bleeding profusely from his gut, our hero, keen Navajo Presidential Aide, Leif Oak stands with his back to the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, a bloody sword sticking out through his stomach.

This is not the way Leif had foreseen his career going, speared by an eviscerating sword, his life spilling out in brilliant bursts. Stabbed in the back by the President.

President Tyrump leans over from the other side of the desk squeezing the hilt of the sword.

Surely Tyrump can slaughter his workers in the Oval Office and not lose a single vote — such is the cult of white Empire, the megalomania that backs Con Don Tyrump’s cult of personality. Bully Boy Don. Carnival Barker Don. White Supremacist Don. Con Don.

In fact, far from losing support, Con Don might gain votes by such dastardly deed. So he thinks, having pierced Leif Oak unintentionally when he had meant only to pretend to play war with his ancestral Bavarian sword in the Oval Office.

Tyrump keeps tight his grip on the hilt of the sword, momentarily stunned by what he has done. Then he plays it off. Tyrump is an experienced actor who knows instinctively how to front a role, and not just any role, the King role, the preeminent part on the main stage of the whole wide world.

Shysters have always been the best Presidents of Empire, in America as elsewhere, going all the way back to the Original Gangster, George Washington. Some would say that the Top Office of the American state was immaculately designed for the Shyster-in-Chief. How else to form a slave-holding, Native-slaughtering, land-wrecking, world-invading Empire and call it a Constitutional democracy? You need that bloody Shyster-in-Chief, every time.

And a fervent, deluded, bigoted citizenry. To whom Tyrump today holds the firmest claim. The quintessential Tyrump voters despise democracy and pompously point out that America is technically not a Constitutional democracy but a Constitutional republic wherein only entitled citizens have the right to select representatives to rule in the public interest. This is why the purest Tyrump voters feel so self-righteous in their efforts to deny the vote to people they look down upon, are bigoted against, or otherwise fear and despise.

Only entitled citizens count in Tyrumplandia.

This putrid claim is that a person must be more than alive and willing to legally vote on a stolen continent that the purest Tyrumpists thievishly think is theirs by Divine Right. Yes Sire, one must be an entitled citizen to legally vote in America, be more like the Masters and Lords of olde. Make America Medieval Again. MAMA. No Sire, life itself is not enough to be Constitutional in America. “Life” not so much a value, after all. America is not a democracy! So say the Good Old Boys. Noble geniuses all. Perish the thought! America is a Grand Old Republic! Worthy of a Grand Old Party of contemptuous entitlement and dripping red wealth.

The opening of Most Revolutionary (2025):

The Dakota Access Pipeline hulks in the ground beneath them like a long and dangerous time bomb. They know it. They feel it.

Three eco-warriors. They are prepared to defuse the DAPL bomb in a way that no one else dares. Hit and run, has to be. A three-woman guerrilla army. Strike force of the Americas. They tried everything else, legal and not. As lawsuits and protests come and go, the oil stops and starts, and only one thing never fails — blow shit up. It’s the most effective strategy they’ve found so far. Don’t blame them — it’s what they know, what they’ve learned, what they care to do. Sometimes things are exactly what they are. Sometimes you fight fire with fire because it’s all you’ve got — even if you know in the end you’ll burn.

---

They are there now, they are alive now, be with them, the three rabble rousers from the Hawkeye state: Jenna Ryzcek, Jasmine Maldonado, and Sabia Perez. They park in the dark and cold of northwestern Iowa next to a stubbled cornfield along Highway 7 near Prairie Creek and North Raccoon River.

“We’re here on the stolen land of several Plains tribes,” says Sabia. “Let’s remember that.”

“You know it,” says Jasmine.

“That’s a fact,” says Jenna.

“It’s time to act with honor,” says Sabia.

“We need to be careful,” says Jasmine.

“We need to act,” says Jenna. “If we don’t stop the flow of oil, we’re all cooked. The planet fried. Anyone here lovesick, carsick, or homesick?”

“Fuck no,” says Sabia. “Let’s do this.”

“Should we really be out here all alone acting on our own?” says Jasmine.

“The whole world’s behind us,” says Jenna.

“You sure?”

“Earth, Girl. It’s rooting for us. Fucking own it.”

The Earth. You can smell it — mud and river — creek and field — farm — a patch of woods — damp night air. And oil — the bitter tang.

It’s late. It’s so very, very late.

Jenna leans on the steering wheel of the old Chevy Bolt and looks into the sweep of headlights at a cluster of heavy machinery parked near the blocky industrial infrastructure of a pipeline transfer station. They’ve scouted this.

“That’s it,” says Jenna. “That’s the target.”

From the front passenger seat, Jasmine scans the machinery, metallic, toxic, inhuman, their adversary. She wants it gone. She studies Jenna whose lips move silently as she reviews their plan of attack.

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• the MFA as suppression machine

• the Armed Services Editions

• the CIA’s actual dollar amounts

• the Red Scares as direct coercive operations

• the Latin American Boom versus the American Big Bang

• the comparative suppressions across Europe and Asia

• the carceral complex

• the gatekeepers as closed social system

• the scholarly apparatus

• the prize culture

• the neuroscience of narrative empathy and direct discourse

• publishing consolidation

• the canonical apparatus working perfectly for the plutocracy

The MFA as Suppression Machine

The MFA system excludes and marginalizes so-called radical writers, and it industrializes the New Critical, modern, and postmodern depoliticization of fiction and scales it to produce an entire class of writers organically incapable of writing in the Big Bang mode — socially engaged dispossessed fiction or otherwise counterhegemonic. Though this de facto exclusion can be reversed, the incapacity is self-reproducing. A writer trained for two or three years in the traditional literature and workshop system not only lacks exposure to Gold and Smedley and McKay and the like, they internalize the aesthetic principles that make Gold and Smedley and McKay unreadable as serious literature. The show don’t tell commandment, the suspicion of the discursive, the privileging of the private interior over public conceptions and recognitions are not merely stylistic preferences. They are the New Critical depoliticization of fiction administered as supposedly universal laws of craft to every writer who passes through the system. This produces gatekeepers and writers who both consciously and unconsciously exclude the so-called radical tradition, the people’s most fundamental liberatory tradition. The result is writers and editors, publishers and scholars, and readers who experience their own most urgent political consciousness as aesthetically suspect. The MFA and creative writing PhD do not need to overtly or even consciously suppress the Big Bang mode of fuller consciousness in writing, because these degrees and programs produce writers who suppress it in themselves before they ever sit down to write. The programmatic ideology bleeds over into publishing, editing, scholarship, and reading the whole while.

Similarly, postmodernism’s approach to writing, and metamodernism’s variant, obliterate or downplay public meaning into little more than rhetorical puzzle and game to limited or no point, which is equally problematic, despite some additional metamodern normative affectation or social critique on the side, tacking back to the modernist and New Criticism mode. These establishment literary modes all have much the same evacuating effect as New Criticism.

The Armed Services Editions

Between 1943 and 1947 the Armed Services Editions distributed approximately 140 million paperbacks to American soldiers and sailors, much of it fiction. This was the single largest distribution of fiction in American history, reaching an audience no publisher, no prize committee, no critical institution had ever reached before or since. The selection committee chose which books those soldiers read, which version of American literature they carried into combat and brought home with them, which novels shaped the literary consciousness of the generation that would dominate American cultural life for the next thirty years. Who got in and who did not is not a neutral question. The Armed Services Editions distributed Hemingway and Steinbeck and Fitzgerald to millions of returning veterans who then populated the universities on the GI Bill and filled the first generation of MFA programs. Gold and Smedley and McKay and others with the most full and vital consciousness did not make the list. The most massive single act of literary distribution in American history was simultaneously one of the most consequential acts of canonical enforcement. It shaped the reading history of an entire generation in the midst of the Hot and Cold Cultural Wars when that generation’s aesthetic shaping would determine what got written, taught, published, and canonized for decades to come: the imperial canon of white empire, depoliticized, marginally diversified, and little democratized today. The Armed Services Editions helped create the imperial police state canon that the establishment still reads, venerates, emulates, and perpetuates.

The CIA’s Actual Dollar Amounts

The Congress for Cultural Freedom, established and funded by the CIA in Berlin, Germany in 1950, funded Encounter magazine and dozens of others in thirty-five countries, sponsored international conferences, supported literary journals, and cultivated relationships with writers and critics across the Western world, and it did so with CIA money, laundered through foundations, administered through cutouts, kept secret until the 1960s when exposed in the media. Frances Stonor Saunders’s The Cultural Cold War documents the specific funding streams, the dollar amounts, the institutional connections. The Iowa Writers Workshop received Rockefeller Foundation funding during the Cold War period. The Rockefeller Foundation was a conduit for CIA cultural operations. The Kenyon Review, the Partisan Review, the institutional infrastructure of American literary culture during the period when the MFA system was being established and the canonical hierarchy was consolidated, all operated in a funding environment shaped by the intelligence community’s explicit interest in producing a “depoliticized” (that is, pro-imperialist, anti-socialist) aesthetically formalist American literary culture that functioned as Cold War propaganda and cultural conditioning. Nothing could be more political than this state-capitalist project, this brute imperial class war of “depoliticizing” American, and world, culture. This is not speculation or inference. The money trail exists and has been documented. Much of the rampant oppressive establishment ideology is widely known by now. The suppression of the Big Bang tradition and the elevation of the canonical entitled literature happened in a literary culture whose institutional funding was in significant part controlled by an agency whose explicit mission was the elimination of communist and socialist cultural influence, operating within and on behalf of a business-ruled imperial culture and society. That’s monetized mental cleansing, brainwashing without anyone either sensing it or being able to stand against it, creating half-minds, half-persons, half-communities. Every institution and individual was impacted or affected by the imperial state conditioning, as all continue to be, because the imperial canon basically remains in place, even with its moderate and neutralized multicultural expansion.

The Red Scares as Direct Coercive Operations

The House Un-American Activities Committee, the FBI surveillance, the loyalty oaths, and the blacklists did to individual writers what the MFA would later do institutionally — silence the radical tradition by making its expression professionally and personally dangerous. Anarchist, editor, and literary critic Emma Goldman deported before she could contribute to the tradition her work helped make possible. Gold’s platform destroyed. Hughes summoned, interrogated, and made an example of by Roy Cohn and Congress. Smedley imprisoned and brutalized during the First Red Scare then dying in exile under FBI surveillance during the Second. The Red Scare didn’t need to bury every writer individually because the demonstration effect on those it did destroy was sufficient to discipline everyone else.

The Latin American Boom and the American Big Bang

The Latin American Boom got institutional infrastructure support that the American Big Bang writers never got. Agent Carmen Balcells coordinated translation pipelines. European publishers treated García Márquez and Vargas Llosa as major world literature. The Nobel committee recognized the tradition repeatedly. Meanwhile, the imperial Americans disappeared their greatest literature, their so-called “radical” novelists, so thoroughly that Gold and Smedley and McKay and others remain unknown to the vast majority of educated American readers a century after they wrote.

That asymmetrical treatment of great literature can only be explained beyond aesthetic judgment. The Latin American Boom was institutionally supported into world canonical status. The American Big Bang was institutionally destroyed. Both operations were performed by the same imperial apparatus — supporting what served it, anything problematic kept at a safe distance, burying what threatened it, calling both operations aesthetic judgment.

The difference wasn’t quality. It wasn’t even politics exactly, as the Latin American Boom contained some anti-imperial consciousness. The difference was proximity and threat level. Magic realism’s political content was safely displaced geographically, historically, and formally — far enough from the American imperial center to be celebrated as world literature, aestheticized into atmosphere, promoted as evidence of American cultural openness. The Big Bang tradition exposed the American imperial and capitalist system as criminal from inside its operations, in real time, in the belly of the beast. That’s what made it intolerable, its proximity to power. That’s why the repression was near total. Some of the same social and political mechanisms that promoted García Márquez buried Gold and Smedley. The same Nobel committee that recognized the Latin American tradition passed over Hughes and McKay. Aesthetic and artistic judgment had nothing to do with it. Nothing at all.

Comparative Suppression — America, Europe, Asia

The suppression of liberatory socialist consciousness and its literary expression has been a recurring operation of state and capitalist power across the twentieth century, each instance sharing the common goal of eliminating the revolutionary literary tradition while differing in mechanism, ideology, and completeness. The Nazi, Soviet, and fascist Italian states each claimed or stole the popular and good name of socialism while collaborating with big business, using plutocratic and state capitalist power. The purpose and effect was to suppress liberatory socialist consciousness and social and cultural organization, including its literary expression, a common endeavor beneath ideologically different oppressions.

The Soviet suppression made martyrs — Babel, Mandelstam, the writers who died or were imprisoned or driven to suicide. Mussolini’s fascist state imprisoned Antonio Gramsci, whose Prison Notebooks — the theoretical foundation this essay draws on most extensively — were written in a fascist prison cell and smuggled out before he died a few days after being released in 1937. Nazi Germany burned the books and exiled or murdered the writers. And the American suppression also produced martyrs, sometimes indirectly, other times directly — Thurman dead at thirty-two, Smedley dying in exile, McKay dying in poverty, Hughes performing contrition before Roy Cohn and the McCarthyite Congress, Larsen in a kind of internal exile as nurse, McNickle unheard, Tsiang unpublished, Gold diminished from the voice that electrified hundreds of thousands to near silence. The American suppression martyred careers and lives alike.

What makes the American suppression distinctive is not only its coercive dimension but its ideological one. The European suppressions produced obvious victims and obvious perpetrators. The violence was visible, the persecution nameable, the martyrs recognizable as martyrs. And the Soviet Union also had its own McGurls, every country does, establishment scholars and critics who genuinely believe that they are applying correct aesthetic principles and institutional analyses while reproducing the suppression. But in the Soviet Union they operated alongside show trials and labor camps that made the ideology visible as ideology even to those administering it. What the American suppression produced differently — in some ways more damning because more insidious — is McGurl without the labor camp, the scholar who reproduces the suppression with complete sincerity while believing he is doing neutral institutional analysis, with no visible coercive apparatus to make the ideology legible as ideology even to himself.

The lobotomy that doesn’t know it’s a lobotomy, administered not by the secret police but by the workshop, the scholar, the prize committee, the reviewers, the publishers, the conditioned readers, and the canonical anthology that can’t see (or doesn’t care to see) its own racism, classism, and imperialism. The Soviet suppression produced martyrs and persecutors, liars and crooks. The American suppression produced martyrs and persecutors, liars and crooks too — and also the non-corrupt but, frankly, brainwashed intellectuals with their skewed, false, and damaging conventional wisdom that the imperial establishment represents and fosters. The martyrs are the measure of the coercive dimension. McGurl and the establishment are the measure of the ideological dimension. A suppression complete enough to produce both — and to make the ideological dimension invisible — is more total than one that relies only on coercive measures.

Other American coercive mechanisms operate alongside the ideological suppression rather than replacing it — the wartime Japanese American internment, institutionalized poverty, the largest prison complex in human history which disproportionately destroys the Black, Latino, and Native American communities whose organic intellectuals created the bulk of the Big Bang tradition. Whole communities are targeted rather than writers directly, making the suppression more deniable and more durable than the Soviet model of visible persecution of named individuals.1

The Carceral Suppression

The American prison complex is not separate from the literary suppression that this whole project documents. It is one of its primary instruments and locations of suppression. H. Bruce Franklin’s Prison Literature in America: The Victim as Criminal and Artist — the first full-length study of American prison literature and a landmark work in American cultural history — argues that prison literature is central rather than peripheral to American literature, that the men and women imprisoned by the American carceral system produce innovative, vital, and formally serious writing that has been suppressed by the same society it condemns.

The same society that imprisons the communities whose organic intellectuals produced the Big Bang tradition also creates the conditions — through poverty, dispossession, and deliberately criminalized behavior — that fill those prisons. Manufacturing crime manufactures the carceral suppression. The United States has the largest prison population in the world both in absolute numbers and per capita, disproportionately destroying Black, Latino, and Native American communities and lives — the very same communities whose organic intellectuals produced the Big Bang tradition and whose ongoing dispossession the Big Bang tradition exposed as criminal. Agnes Smedley survived prison herself. The prison is the physically coercive force operating alongside the ideological suppression. You can imprison Gold’s neighbors, like Smedley, without imprisoning Gold, destroy the community that produces the organic intellectual without staging the show trial that would make the suppression visible as suppression. The carceral system atomizes the communities of the dispossessed, interrupts the transmission of organic intellectual culture across generations, and produces a literature of survival and resistance that the canonical tradition then buries alongside everything else it cannot accommodate. The more criminalized the people, the easier it is to suppress their literature — their consciousness, their conscience, their voice, their lives.

Franklin was fired from Stanford in 1972 — the first tenured professor dismissed from Stanford in its history — for his antiwar activism, an instance of the suppression pattern operating on the scholar whose work would soon most directly name the relationship between the carceral system and the buried literary tradition. Like Barbara Foley, denied tenure at Northwestern for her activism and scholarship on the proletarian novel tradition, Franklin landed at Rutgers Newark — the same institution, a telling convergence. The establishment couldn’t entirely silence either of them. It could only push them to the margins, which is where the most honest and far-seeing American literary scholarship has always had to work.2

The Gatekeepers as a Closed Social System

Maxwell Perkins went to an elite prep school and then Harvard. The early New Critics — Ransom, Tate, Warren — were Southern Agrarians, Vanderbilt men, their literary politics inseparable from their reactionary, neo-feudal class and regional politics. The Partisan Review circle orbited Columbia and the New York intellectual establishment, their anti-Stalinism moving through Cold War witch hunts, blacklists, and career burnings seamlessly into Cold War liberalism and the literary conservatism and imperialism that made them natural allies of the canonical hierarchy that they claimed to critique. The Nobel committee that awarded Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck and passed over Hughes and McKay was a Swedish academy of establishment literary men whose relationship to American proletarian fiction, liberatory engaged literature, was approximately zero. It’s not conspiracy. It’s sociology, imperial economics, and politics, a closed circulation of cultural capital, influence, and enforcement.

The people who decided what American literature was and would be attended the same schools, published in the same journals, socialized in the same circles, and shared the same fundamental class interest in a literary culture that reflected their world back at them as universal. Gold grew up on the Lower East Side. Smedley grew up stranded in farm country and mining camps. McKay came from Jamaica and lived in Harlem rooming houses. They were not in the room where canonical decisions were made and they were never going to be, not necessarily because of an openly coordinated exclusion but because the room was a class formation, a cultural fact, an imperial court, its aesthetic judgments inseparable from its dominant plutocratic position and commitments, its universalist claims the projection of an imperial social world onto the whole of human experience.

The Scholarly Apparatus

Lionel Trilling at Columbia, Cleanth Brooks at Yale, F.O. Matthiessen at Harvard, Malcolm Cowley editing the canonical anthologies — the academic literary establishment constructed the critical vocabulary that made the Big Bang tradition unreadable as serious literature before the MFA existed to institutionalize that vocabulary as craft education. The New Critical intentional and affective fallacies disqualified political intention and political response as aesthetic failure. The canonical anthologies simply omitted Gold and Smedley and McKay and the like, making their absence feel like the natural order of literary value rather than an act of suppression. The establishment’s politicized depoliticization — imperial state-capitalist scholarly conformity dressed as neutral aesthetic judgment — was the ideological engine the MFA later scaled into an industrial force.

The Prize Culture as Suppression Instrument

The Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Nobel committee did not recognize the Big Bang tradition. They actively consecrated its opposite, rewarding the sympathetically observational position, the historical displacement, the imperial politics called political neutrality of form that the canonical tradition requires. Every prize given to Hemingway and Faulkner and Steinbeck was simultaneously a judgment against Gold and Smedley and McKay and Hughes and others — sometimes through conscious ideological intervention, as when Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler blocked Sinclair Lewis from the Pulitzer on explicitly political grounds, more often through criteria that made the so-called radical tradition’s achievements invisible as achievements without requiring anyone to name what they were suppressing. The prize is not neutral recognition. It is highly political and ideologically warped under its aesthetic dress.

The Neuroscience of Narrative Empathy

Research by cognitive psychologists Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley — among others — has established measurable relationships between fiction reading, narrative transportation, and empathic capacity. Simply put, reading fiction makes people more empathetic than does reading nonfiction. This research suggests that the more completely a reader inhabits a character’s consciousness rather than observing it from outside, the stronger the empathic response — which suggests that the structural difference between, say, Smedley’s first-person interiority and Hemingway’s observer position is not merely aesthetic but carries measurable empathic consequences. This affects how moving, meaningful, and impactful a novel might be.

The reader of Daughter of Earth has no exit from Marie Rogers’s consciousness — no authorial distance, no ironic frame, no narrative position of safety from which to observe her suffering as spectacle. The reader of A Farewell to Arms observes Catherine Barkley’s suffering and death from inside Frederic Henry’s consciousness, which is itself a position of comparative privilege and narrative control. The structural difference is not merely aesthetic. It’s normative and it’s neurological. It produces different degrees of what researchers call transportation and identification, different capacities for empathy into lives unlike the reader’s own. The Big Bang novels do something to readers that Hemingway and Fitzgerald structurally cannot, not because they are more emotionally manipulative but because they offer no retreat into the observer position, no narrative safety net between the reader’s consciousness and the consciousness of the dispossessed.

A literary culture that systematically buries this mode of fiction and rewards not only the observer position but the organic imperial consciousness itself — the propertied, the entitled, the conquerors of their own sensitive interior lives — has made a choice about what kind of empathic capacity its readers will develop, which is to say what kind of citizens, what kind of human beings, the culture will produce: ones structurally incapable of fully inhabiting the consciousness of the dispossessed, which is exactly what imperial culture requires of them. A culture that cannot inhabit the consciousness of the dispossessed can watch them die. History and the living present both demonstrate where that leads.

The Neuroscience of Direct Discourse

The neuroscience of narrative empathy addresses the difference between observer position and inhabited consciousness — between Hemingway’s Frederic Henry watching Catherine die and Smedley’s Marie Rogers living her own destruction and, as the novel’s retrospective opening makes clear, revolutionizing her way out of it — choosing work of “limitless scope and significance” over private suffering, individually and collectively. And there is a further neurological and political dimension that the empathy research doesn’t fully address — the effect of direct discourse, the essayistic and prosecutorial voice that speaks directly into the reader’s thoughts and consciousness rather than showing indirectly through scene and character. Hugo’s direct analyses of the sewer system, of Waterloo, of convents and religion, of slang, of revolutionary philosophy, of the Paris underworld in Les Misérables are not interruptions of the novel’s empathic work. They are extensions of it — the discursive consciousness naming the structural conditions that produce the suffering and the liberations that the narrative dramatizes, making the system’s criminality and the means and ways of liberatory revolutionary change not only felt through character but understood through argument.

The reader of Les Misérables does not only feel Valjean’s suffering from inside his consciousness. They understand the specific institutional mechanisms — the law, the prison, the police, the economic system — that produced it, pinpointed by the authorial voice without apology or ironic distance. This combination — inhabited consciousness plus direct structural analysis — produces something the pure scenic method cannot produce and the neuroscience of transportation and identification doesn’t fully account for. It produces not only empathic extension into lives unlike the reader’s own but political understanding of the system producing those lives. The reader is thereby both moved and informed, argued with, shown the natures and mechanisms of oppression and liberty.

The MFA’s show don’t tell commandment, institutionalized as craft principle, eliminates empathic depth and political cognition — the reader’s capacity to understand the structural conditions their empathy is responding to. A literary culture that buries the discursive novel alongside the inhabited consciousness novel has made a choice about not only what kind of empathic capacity its readers will develop but what kind of political understanding they will be capable of. The fully human novel — inhabited consciousness plus direct structural analysis, feeling plus argument, the personal inseparable from the societal systemic — does something to readers that neither the scenic novel nor the purely essayistic tradition can do alone. That combination is what the Big Bang tradition achieves at its fullest. That combination is what the canonical tradition and its MFA institutionalization were pointedly built to prevent.

Consolidation and Burial

The structural correlation between publishing consolidation and the contraction of the people’s fullest human fiction in American literary culture is accurate, with one important qualification. The suppression was already effectively complete before the consolidation waves hit. The Red Scare social and cultural assaults buried Gold and Smedley and McKay and others in the 1940s and 1950s, just as the first Red Scare suppressed their lives and work decades earlier. Then the New Critics constructed the aesthetic vocabulary that made them unreadable as serious literature. The MFA system institutionalized that vocabulary. Publishing consolidation didn’t create the burial. It inherited it, extended it, and made it permanent by gutting the institutional possibility of reversal.

Consolidation helped foreclose any full recovery of the greatest and most vital literature. In the 1960s, the first wave of publishing consolidation brought independent literary publishers into entertainment conglomerates whose high-profit imperatives began reshaping acquisition decisions. In the 1980s, the leveraged buyout era accelerated the process. Simon & Schuster was acquired by Gulf and Western, Random House changed hands repeatedly. The logic of the quarterly earnings report weighed on editorial culture for the first time. In the 1990s and 2000s the megamergers produced the Big Five, five corporate houses controlling the overwhelming majority of American literary publishing, each a subsidiary of multinational entertainment conglomerates with no institutional interest in fiction that names their class as criminal.

The suppression of liberatory fiction and full human consciousness — which is necessarily anti-imperial — doesn’t require a directive from the boardroom. It requires only that acquisition editors internalize the inhuman imperial cultural logic of the market. Books that might alienate corporate advertisers, attract government scrutiny, or challenge the class position of the affluent and dominant book-buying demographics are both bad business risks and bad cultural risks by the profiteering logic of financial empire. The independent and university presses operate under the same financial gravity, their marginality a measure of the same pressure.

The multicultural explosion partially complicated this picture. The diversification of voices that forced its way into publishing from the 1960s onward — Morrison, Silko, Kingston, Reed, Rivera, Acosta, Allison, Erdrich, Gaines, Cisneros, and many others — represented another wave of the buried tradition asserting itself, and consolidation could not entirely contain it. Nor did it need to, because consolidation shaped what the multicultural expansion could become. The immigrant novel, the historical atrocity novel, the domestic trauma novel — these were admissible. The explicitly socialist novel, the contemporaneous anti-empire novel, the explicitly antiwar novel, the civic dispossessed tradition overtly exposing the societal system as criminal in the living present — these remained outside what the consolidated publishing market, and even the larger publishing sphere, could accommodate or would.

The multicultural expansion diversified the faces without fully restoring or creating space for the most basic and comprehensive politics, and therefore the fullest consciousness and the greatest societal revelation. Consolidation ensured that the multicultural explosion would be far more limited than it could have been, all the while it would be promoted as the most revolutionary thing possible, and who could go farther? In a plutocracy, money decides what gets published. Money deciding what gets published influences ideology across the whole culture, including throughout the universities. The American publishing market, consolidated into five corporate houses answerable to multinational shareholders, is the ideological choice of empire posed as commercial inevitability.

We are not in a wholly socialist era. But a progressive populist, anti-imperial, antiwar consciousness is pushing toward one — against everything the plutocracy can mobilize to stop it. State-capitalist forces resist this ideologically and institutionally, including through the schools and universities. The latter often delude themselves into believing otherwise, that they are unaffected and not deeply complicit in this ideology. They are professionals at such delusion — most not corrupt, merely conditioned.

The Canon Is Not Corrupt — It Works Perfectly, for the Plutocracy

The fake canon is not a mistake. It is not an oversight, not a failure of aesthetic judgment, not even primarily a conspiracy. It is the correct functioning of a capitalist literary networked machine doing what a capitalist literary machine is built to do — propagate imperial ideology and call it liberal enlightenment.

The establishment canon produces and reproduces the cultural consciousness that serves the interests of the class that controls the institutions and many mechanisms that shape the society and the individuals within it. Every ruling class in history has controlled culture and used it to naturalize its own dominance, and so the imperial establishment continues to build institutions of literary education — universities, MFA programs, prize committees, journals, presses, review publications — and call them neutral when they are not.

They call their aesthetic judgments universal when they are not. They call their canonical hierarchies the natural order of literary value when it is in many ways the inversion of literary value. They now call the suppressed tradition and the buried tradition marginal and good for inclusion, when in reality this denied literature contains the core cultural consciousness and inheritance. The canon is not corrupt. It works perfectly. For some. For the system of domination. The canon works perfectly — for the plutocracy. Which is to say it is entirely corrupted. Not partially, not in isolated instances, not fixable by inclusion or diversity initiatives or canonical revision at the margins. Corrupted in the root, in its founding, in its institutional design, in the class and imperial interests it was built to serve. The canon is not corrupt. It’s fraudulent. In central ways. A corrupt institution has betrayed its original purpose. An entirely corrupted one, a fraudulent and fake one, never had any more fundamental purpose. The canon was supposed to be fake, and it is. It represents an accommodationist privileged us and excludes an engaged dispossessed them.

The mistake — the mistake this essay exists to correct — is believing it was ever anything other than an instrument of culturally imperial partisan control, an imperial inversion, and that the people who built it were disinterested aesthetic judges rather than organic intellectuals of the bigoted propertied class making the cultural choices that served their prejudicial and class commitments while calling those choices aesthetics, art, literature.

That’s what happened. That’s how it happened. Read it and weep and resist. The instruments of suppression have been outed. The mechanisms have been detailed. The buried tradition has been reviewed and re-established in intellectual conception and social context. What remains to be done?

To build the counter-institutions and the curricula, the new canon, and the critical vocabulary that puts the people’s literature at the center of consciousness, reality, and art, where it belongs. And to call the fake canon what it is: not the summit of American literary achievement but an ongoing act of self and social destruction.

So the argument here is true, as far as I can tell, but people will need to judge for themselves. This essay does the work, argues with evidence. It shows the novels in context of art and culture and steps back. The novels are the proof. Anyone who reads Daughter of Earth after reading this essay will judge for themselves. Anyone who reads Banjo, Jews Without Money, The Blacker the Berry, Passing, Not Without Laughter, The Surrounded, The Hanging on Union Square will judge for themselves.

The people who are ready to judge will judge. Some will see it immediately. Some will resist and then return. Some will never see it. That’s always been the condition of the suppressed tradition, including its criticism. This project comes from outside the establishment and its dominant forces, the whole business — the prize culture, the scholarly authority, the MFA prestige — that perpetrates and enforces its evaluations in deliberate ignorance of the full scope of evidence. Now, instead, here are the novels, here is the argument. See the suppression network that keeps them from you, and go read them and judge for yourself. The final answer is not the argument about them, not the ultimately deranged societal efforts that buried them, not the criticism that failed them, not even the condemnation of the lie that replaced them. The answer is the novels. Those of the past and of the living tradition today. The argument continues. Everything else must begin anew.

Daughter of Earth. Banjo. The Blacker the Berry. Passing. Not Without Laughter. Jews Without Money. The Surrounded. Quicksand. Plum Bun. Home to Harlem. The Hanging on Union Square. The best of the American novel. The most brilliant, most vital, most literary, most liberatory moment in American literature.

Read the novels. Read them against the big lie — the half-literature full of half-persons and half-communities, the lobotomy enforced by Red Scare repression of socialism, democracy, and culture, institutionalized by the MFA, completed by a century of state-capitalist propaganda.

Read and reconsider everything — what American literature and culture and society is, what it could have been, what was stolen from it and from you, what the canonical tradition you were taught actually represents, how state-capitalism and empire intervenes, what the MFA produces and why, what scholarship legitimizes and what it buries, what propaganda does to a culture’s capacity to know its own best achievements and to know itself — who and what it is, who and what we can be, might be, must be. Consider and reconsider everything in light of the literary Big Bang in the novel.

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Mark McGurl, Frederic Jameson, and the MFA System

In 2009 in The Program Era, Stanford scholar Mark McGurl argued that the creative writing MFA program has been the dominant institutional force shaping American fiction since World War Two — more influential than any single author, movement, publishing house, or other cultural force. Late in the book in a section on the overriding focus on “excellence” in universities and in “human enterprises” and thus in creative writing programs, McGurl by diagram reveals his view of “a system-wide rise in the excellence of American literature in the postwar period”:

McGurl sees American literature over the past three-quarters of a century as variants of “excellence” in establishment modernism, produced in styles both minimalist and maximalist, taking after Hemingway and Faulkner respectively. It’s a very aesthetic, formalist, New Critical, and canonical understanding of American literature and its production. McGurl’s next book, Everything and Less (2021), in its desultory and grasping way about the dominance of Amazon in book production and distribution, basically notes that little has basically changed. Still more Jamesian, New Critical modernism, now called reflexive modernism, perpetuating the focus on the self, the interior, the individual adjusting to the challenges of society, but now often in more palatable genre-based forms of self insight and therapy. McGurl’s scholarly insider account is as unwittingly hegemonic as the institutional literary culture it documents — narcissistic and imperially complicit in the same structural sense, the framework reproducing the hegemony it studies.

McGurl’s diagrammed understanding of American literature is revealing for what it excludes — most everything focused on in the Big Bang theory. The entire system of literature is establishment in ideology — High Modernism/Genius, Professionalism/Craft, Technomodernism/Technicity, High Cultural Pluralism/Ethnicity, Lower-Middle-Class Modernism/Work. Literary fiction is the locus and synthesis of these establishment streams, while similarly formulated genre grows to crowd out literary fiction. The dashed line between Genre Fiction is the only gesture toward anything outside the establishment literary world, and that is treated as a boundary that is largely dissolved and incorporated into establishment modernisms a dozen years later with the dominance of Amazon and distribution by algorithm in books.

What this conception of American literary fiction, this diagram cannot or will not accommodate, what falls entirely outside its coordinates, is the greatest American literary tradition — dispossessed liberatory literature. The Big Bang six don’t fit anywhere on this chart. Michael Gold is not Lower-Middle-Class Modernism — he’s organic working class socialist fiction, revolutionary liberatory fiction, categorically different from Carver’s workshop-produced lower-middle-class realism. Claude McKay isn’t High Cultural Pluralism — he’s organic explicit contemporaneous anti-imperialism. Treating Toni Morrison and Philip Roth under Ethnicity reveals the diagram’s deepest limitation — ethnic identity as a formal category rather than a political position, the multicultural absorption operation that takes the identity dimension while managing the political content into aesthetic form. Agnes Smedley has no coordinates here. D’Arcy McNickle has no coordinates here. The entire people’s liberatory tradition — the socialist era, the Harlem Renaissance and its liberatory aftermath in its most politically explicit form, the explicitly anti-imperial dispossessed multicultural stream — none of it has coordinates in McGurl’s universe. The McGurl chart of American literature is basically a diagram of the establishment’s own Cold War canonical imperatives, its decisions, actions, conclusions — reactionary and liberal simultaneously, the political suppression of the socialist and revolutionary tradition naturalized as aesthetic development. The witting imperial and hegemonic made unwitting imperial and hegemonic made aesthetic. Or more plainly stated: the McGurl chart of American literature is basically a diagram of the establishment’s own reactionary and liberal Cold War brainwashing and lobotomization.

The chart doesn’t just omit the Big Bang tradition. It constructs a coordinate system in which that tradition is literally unlocatable — not marginal, not at the edges, but outside the geometry of thought entirely. The diagram is the imperial establishment ideology that presents the suppression of the people’s liberatory literature as the natural shape of American literary possibility. This is a chart of aesthetics and identity that says nothing about political consciousness, political position, or ideology. A politics and ideology free literature! Zombie lit. Perfect for empire, which demands only one politics — its own. Preferably written as invisible but omnipresent, and monolithic, per the diagram.

McGurl thinks the MFA program era has democratized literary culture. The diagram shows it has lobotomized it. McGurl thinks that the MFA program has democratized literary culture beyond the Eastern establishment elite. Instead, it has more profoundly universalized variants of permissible imperial ideology from the imperial establishment elite. And it has done so in part, as McGurl documents somewhat inadvertently, by standardizing aesthetic values, by creating workshop consensus, and by a house style that rewards technical polish and psychological interiority over insurgent political ambition and its consequent formal risk. McGurl does not examine what sort of political consciousness and its consequent novel insights have actually been gutted, because he either never fully saw them in the first place, or simply wrote them out of his formulations because esteemed marginal, or non-canonical, or for whatever reasons.

McGurl provides an institutional analysis of the MFA system that in part supports my argument about the pipeline from Cold War anti-communist literary values to contemporary workshop aesthetics even though he himself does not make much of that political argument explicitly. He sees the program era as a cultural project in expressing modernist subjectivity after World War Two, when it’s actually a Cold War “anti-communist,” imperial, ideological and political project conducive to capitalist business interests and power. Any and all aesthetic expression takes a back seat to that project. No, no, no, cry the literati — we are enlightened in our aesthetics! No, you are blind to anything but your aesthetics and your identities, preferably expressed with extreme interiority and individuality, there being so very little of the most vital explicit contemporary realities of the public allowed to be seen, dramatized, and discoursed directly. You are liberals and conservatives, not free thinkers beyond those tight constraints. Explicit contemporaneous anti-imperialism is taboo in your establishment ideologies and publishing houses and related and largely subordinate ecosystem. You think you are not, but you are blinded by your own ideologies, and so are a lot of leftists too in literary realms, as we’ve seen in part, and will see some more, so thorough and severe has the hegemonic literary suppression been. A lot of leftists have acquiesced to a lot of liberal, conservative, and worse literary culture, a terrible thing to see. You want more facts and evidence because it cuts so gratingly against your ideology, but you can’t comprehend the facts and evidence that have already been presented to you.

I warned you — this is no conventional work of scholarship but part novel by revolutionary novelist. I need to restrain myself from going ever more expansive in novelistic consciousness. Maybe I shouldn’t hold back here. Or maybe I should get back to writing the next installments of Ultra Revolutionary and Loop Day and other works and continue that liberatory consciousness there. By the end of this serialization, I’ll go into more personal essay to explain with some first-hand detail the problems of left consciousness struggling to understand itself in literary forms in literature and art as opposed to leftists far more perceptive understandings in clinical poltical analysis and reporting.

McGurl’s aestheticism and sociology is partly observant. He sees what the establishment is doing through its own perspective. He doesn’t see how limited this range of view is. Or if he does he basically ignores that reality. Apparently thoroughly institutionalized, he misses a lot across the trilogy of his books on twentieth and twenty-first century literature: The Novel Art (2001), The Program Era (2009), and Everything and Less (2021). The evidence of the blindness begins in his introduction to The Novel Art where he states:

And indeed, it should be said from the outset that the interpretive models I will develop here become, as applied to the 1930s, not so much weakened as substantially narrowed in their explanatory power, as the appearance of the Popular Front produces class formations and cultural allegiances that may or may not be comprehended adequately in the terms I will be using here.

This is McGurl wittingly acknowledging what applies to his first book on high modernism while unwittingly acknowledging the severe limits of his next two books that would explain the influence on contemporary fiction of MFA programs and Amazon as industry. In other words, this is McGurl unwittingly indicating that his conception of American fiction — his MFA era diagram and Amazon analysis — cannot adequately comprehend a significant portion of what it’s supposed to be explaining. Though it thinks it can.

In The Program Era and beyond McGurl basically writes off liberatory populist fiction, socialist fiction, explicit contemporaneous anti-imperial fiction, revolutionary dispossessed fiction, the people’s liberatory fiction as outside his field of study of fiction. That is, he writes off the greatest literary fiction in American history. He chooses or simply defaults to study what he doesn’t see as the lesser tradition of American fiction over a century and a half — the establishment canon. It’s natural, within the establishment. Blind but natural. What else is typically conceivable for an establishment figure to study?

In The Novel Art McGurl traces how Henry James initiated the elevation of the American novel from popular entertainment to fine art, creating the “art novel” as a distinct category. The writers who followed — Crane, Wharton, Stein, Faulkner, Hammett, Barnes — are unified by their anxious relationship to a genre they were trying to make respectable as high art, McGurl argues. His key insight is that the art novel paradoxically sought elite status while remaining dependent on the mass market, and that modernism’s obsession with simple-mindedness — the idiot, the primitive, the naive consciousness — Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, etc — was a strategy for achieving sophistication through contrast with the low.

In The Program Era, McGurl explores that the MFA creative writing program is the dominant institutional force shaping postwar American fiction, producing establishment multiculturalism, establishment rhetorical play, and establishment politics — as opposed to, he does not add, the people’s full consciousness and full critique of the contemporary omnicidal culture, society, and reality, despite some occasional gestures in that direction.

In McGurl’s third book in this sequence Everything and Less, the capitalist might of Amazon replaces the MFA program as the dominant institution shaping fiction. In the age of Amazon, McGurl claims, every novel is a genre novel, literary fiction is just one category among thousands, the reader has become consumer of highly readable introspective, individualist therapeutic novels, and the writer a service provider, and the algorithm has reorganized the entire fiction universe around customer satisfaction rather than aesthetic value or political seriousness.

What McGurl misses across all three books is the political and ideological dimension of the canon-making he documents. He treats the elevation of the art novel, the MFA system, and the Amazon era as sociological and institutional phenomena without asking whose class interests these formations served and what they suppressed in the process. The Novel Art documents Henry James’s elevation without asking why Gold and Smedley, McKay and others, and the Old Left critics, were buried simultaneously. The Program Era documents the MFA house style without connecting it to Cold War anti-communist ideology. Everything and Less documents Amazon’s deflating of literary influence without noting that the suppressed tradition was already blocked, buried, and belittled long before Amazon arrived. Within establishment imperial limits, McGurl is an insightful literary sociologist who consistently stops a long way short of the political analysis that would make his sociology fundamentally insightful and effective, rather than merely descriptive of the establishment.

Why is that? Why the intellectual limitation? Why the ideological truncation and distortion? The answer is shown explicitly in the introduction to The Novel Art where McGurl announces that his framework does not apply to the greatest American literature that he doesn’t even look at — the most intellectually and psychologically, socially and politically, and emotionally serious and formally significant tradition in American fiction. Not every novelist followed James and the fancy modernists. The best didn’t. He then proceeds to write a history of American fiction as if that pre-eminent people’s tradition does not exist. The popular front, the engaged proletarian novel, the Harlem Renaissance, the dispossessed and revolutionary liberatory tradition — he waves it all off as outside his explanatory framework and calls it intellectual honesty when it’s actually the lobotomized and brainwashed structuring omission that makes his entire argument possible. McGurl’s criticism has the same severe limits and misrepresentation of reality that are pervasive in establishment novels and the establishment literary ecosystem.

Establishment literary sociology can only look the way it does to McGurl — Henry James to William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway to the MFA to Amazon — because he excludes the tradition that would blow up the establishment line of American literature, the canon. His imperial canonized line from Henry James to the art novel to the program era to Amazon and genre makes for an unbothered institutional story because he’s written out the literary, cultural, and political counterforce that interrupted and challenged that line at every stage. The Big Bang doesn’t fit his framework not because it’s marginal but because it’s the central challenge to everything his framework is built to explain. McGurl’s framework doesn’t become narrowed or challenged by the liberatory literature of the 1930s — of the socialist era — it collapses. He just politely declines to say so. Or does he? No, he altogether denies and avoids it. As if it’s impermissible to think, or impossible. Which — maybe so.

His passing qualification, possibly an attempt at conciliation, is more damning than simple omission. He appears to see the problem — or part of it — names it briefly, and moves on. That’s not intellectual limitation, not entirely. Or if it is, it’s also an ideological choice dressed as methodological modesty. It’s similar to how Lionel Trilling dismissed the socialist purview of V.L. Parrington, and how the New Critics dismissed the liberatory proletarian tradition — with a quick wave of the hand — performed by McGurl at the level of supposedly neutral literary sociology. Establishment ideology reproduces itself like a virus. People can be both so very easily influenced and so very stuck in their ways, and the latter often play and prey upon the former.

McGurl’s The Program Era is the most directly relevant of his books to the Big Bang discussion and argument here because it documents the institutional structure — the MFA system — that completed the suppression the Red Scare began. The pipeline from Cold War anti-communist aesthetics to workshop house style is the argument, and McGurl provides the institutional evidence for it, while stopping far short of the most penetrating literary and cultural assessment, let alone political.

Everything and Less extends the argument into the present. Amazon as the new institutional force, every novel a genre novel, literary fiction just another customer satisfaction category. This analysis is useful even though he again stops short of asking why the suppressed tradition remains suppressed even in an era of apparent democratization. If he can see it at all. The answer is that Amazon didn’t bury Gold and Smedley and McKay and the rest of the people’s liberatory literature. The Cold War machinery did that decades earlier, and Amazon simply inherited and extended a literary culture already gutted of its best work, its best tradition.

The Novel Art quote is the most damning thing — or, to be kind, exposing — about his studies that McGurl could have written, because he announces the structuring omission at the outset of his career and then builds three books on top of it. The popular front, the engaged proletarian tradition, the Harlem Renaissance, the dispossessed fiction, the people’s liberatory literature, the revolutionary and anti-imperial tendencies, the most accomplished American novels are waved off as outside his explanatory framework as if in a single subordinate clause, and then the silence continues for twenty years and three books. That’s not an oversight, or if it is it’s a whale of one. It’s establishment imperial ideology reproducing itself in the scholarship that claims to analyze itself. It shows that even some of the most delineated and dogged institutional analyses of American fiction, some of the most influential, like McGurl’s, automatically and instinctively replicate both literary and cultural suppression, not to mention political suppression that one would think it would not wish to perpetuate. But if you can’t see the suppression, you don’t know you are replicating it.

McGurl’s scholarship has the same problem as that of the establishment critics that my essay critiques throughout. McGurl is sophisticated enough to see some literary and cultural structures clearly, map them in his own way, name some components accurately, and still not see that he’s simply scratching the surface of the literary problem — the problem with literature in America, and beyond. He’s trapped inside the environment he’s describing. A Stanford English professor with a Harvard PhD and a New York Times and New York Review of Books background documenting the MFA system is himself a product of the institutional box he analyzes. He can describe the machinery without condemning it because the machinery has worked for him, or at least hasn’t worked against him in the ways it worked and works against the people, including artists of the dispossessed such as Gold and Smedley and McKay and countless other vital authors, artists, and intellectuals — the organic great creators of the people.

McGurl is a Gramscian organic intellectual too but of the propertied hegemonic establishment. He is not of the dispossessed or even of the anti-hegemonic propertied class, not by the standards of his work. He analyses the structures that produce organic and traditional intellectuals mainly of the establishment, from within the establishment, without the dispossessed or anti-hegemonic purview that would make the establishment’s structures and functions visible so often as literary, and cultural, and political damage as much or more than anything else. The establishment does some good things within its limits, some of which McGurl explores. It also has a very tyrannical and bloody and suppressive dimension that McGurl largely skips right over. Parrington and Calverton and Smith could see what McGurl cannot, or will not, because they were fighting from the outside, against bigoted state-capitalism, and doing so based on liberatory socialist and anti-empire principles. Their literary criticism was itself an act of resistance to the canonical mechanisms and machinations that McGurl waves off in a subordinate clause and never looks at directly.

The people in the institutions who are positioned to evaluate my own argument here are the people whose positions depend on not seeing what it argues. Things are structured that way by powerful financial and political forces. It’s no coincidence. It’s the imperial system working as designed. Which is why this essay winds up on a platform like Substack and not in establishment circles. The fate of this essay is emblematic of the argument. One might imagine the ghost of Agnes Smedley challenging Mark McGurl to a literary duel at high noon — McKay her second, Gold loading the weapons, novels versus textbooks. Or imagine Smedley’s ghost presenting McGurl with the subordinate clause and waiting for his answer. The silence would be familiar. Why is she a ghost? MFA ideologies like his wrote her out of the canon, all but out of history.

The Substack debate about MFAs is largely happening within the terms McGurl set, which are themselves the terms of the entitled and propertied establishment institutions and ideologies. A thoughtful Rutgers University professor Jeffrey Lawrence recently described The Program Era as still “unparalleled as an account of the creative writing ‘system,’” noting its “blind spots” while treating it as the authoritative framework for the MFA debate — which apparently it is! Blind spots is a polite establishment formulation for what I argue are massive ideological omissions and normative and material evisceration. It’s not just “cultural amnesia” induced by platform culture that guts debates about American literature, or any literature. That’s insufficient as an explanation when the amnesia about the Big Bang tradition predates platform culture by decades. The Red Scare politicized Cold War imperialist assault induced that amnesia. The MFA system institutionalized it. Amazon inherited it. McGurl documents unwittingly the later stages of a suppression that was already complete before his framework begins. My argument enters this conversation, if it might at all, from outside those restrictions entirely, which is both why it matters and why it will struggle to be heard by the people currently having the conversation.

McGurl’s analytical framework has become the dominant vocabulary for the MFA debate, and since his framework excludes the Big Bang tradition in a subordinate clause, the debate conducted on his “terms” inherits that exclusion without knowing it. The debate never asks whether the MFA system was built on the burial of the greatest American literary tradition and whether its aesthetic and normative commitments, its art — falsely depoliticized, overly privatized and interiorized, and formally aestheticizing — are the institutionalized form of that burial continuing into the present. That’s what the debate conducted in McGurl’s terms cannot say. Not because McGurl suppressed it deliberately but because his framework was formed by the institutional tradition that suppressed the Big Bang and the long historical line of the most accomplished and most vital American literature. And the Substack debate inherited that blindness along with the vocabulary sufficient to perpetuate its own blindness.

The Big Bang stays invisible even in the most serious establishment critiques of the institution that made it invisible, as one would expect. Even the sharpest critics of the MFA system — Junot Díaz on its whiteness, the n+1 writers on its provincialism, McGurl on its internal structural twists and turns — conduct their critique within a framework that never asks whether the institution was built on the burial of the greatest American literary tradition. The suppressed tradition stays suppressed even in the most thoroughgoing critiques of the institution that suppressed it. McGurl’s subordinate clause reproduces itself unseen, like the most ethereal of ghosts, in every subsequent account — including the accounts that most seriously challenge the institution responsible for burying the greatest American literature.

McGurl is an organic intellectual of the professional-managerial class — the class produced by and for the university system, the MFA program, the literary establishment. He’s organic to that class and culture in the sense that his intellectual work serves its interests, maps its territory, and legitimizes its operations, even when it’s ostensibly analyzing them critically, or especially then. The Program Era doesn’t threaten the MFA system. It gave the MFA system its most prestigious scholarly account of itself. The establishment can accept McGurl’s analysis completely, tweaking it correctively here and there, because the analysis never fully considers whose interests it serves and what the fundamental scope and range of those effects are. The analysis is helped in doing this by having dismissed outright the best of America’s literary traditions.

The suppressed six novelists of the Big Bang were liberatory organic intellectuals and engaged artists of the dispossessed. Their intellectual work served the interests of the class they came from and wrote about and for. McGurl is an organic intellectual of the class that runs the institutions that suppressed that tradition. He can see the inside of the establishment institutions, not the outside, not the limits, because wittingly or not he’s a hegemonic not anti-hegemonic intellectual of the establishment.

Junot Díaz’s “MFA vs. POC” argument is that MFA programs are too white in faculty, curriculum, and workshop culture. They reproduce the dominant culture’s blind whales around race. Writers of color find their work marginalized, their references ignored, their approach baselessly and offensively contested, their critiques of racial content in white students’ work dismissed and angrily resisted. The workshop fails to include diverse voices and actively suppresses them through the many dynamics of white majority spaces claiming aesthetic neutrality and what amounts to unwitting (typically) supremacist superiority. It’s true, and McGurl missed all that and more.

Díaz makes the racial diversity argument powerfully and from inside his own experience, which is organic and badly needed. But he doesn’t make the class argument, the socialist argument, the explicit anti-imperial argument, or the explicit anti-war argument — though he is presumably sympathetic to all of it. He wants more writers of color in the MFA system, a more diverse curriculum, better representation. He doesn’t ask whether the MFA system’s fundamental aesthetic commitments — the deceptively politicized depoliticized workshop, the frequent Carveresque house style, the studied social neutrality — are themselves the problem regardless of who’s in the room.

So Díaz’s critique is real and important but it’s the identity dimension of the suppression argument without the class and overarching imperial dimension. It gets at the white in “white empire” but not all the way at the empire. More Black and brown writers in MFA programs don’t automatically produce the class and anti-imperial explicit drama and discourse of Gold or Smedley or McKay, though it is more likely to given that race in America, and beyond, so often correlates to class and empire. It might produce more writers of color making the immigrant assimilation novel or the domestic trauma novel or the historical atrocity novel, which can be valuable but are too often used to bar the inclusion of far more explicit and contemporary revolutionary and anti-empire works regardless of who writes them. The multicultural revolution too often went only as far as diversifying the faces of the sensitive privileged consciousness without fundamentally challenging the canonical commitment to keeping overt and contemporary socialist, antiwar, and anti-empire work out of literary fiction. Díaz’s argument is part of that revolution — necessary, genuine, insufficient.

Díaz notes in his “MFA vs. POC” essay that when he was at Cornell he used whatever leverage he had as a student organizing with others to help bring novelist Helena María Viramontes onto the Cornell faculty:

One of our crowning triumphs, something I still take pride in, was that we were able to push through our first fiction faculty of color in the MFA program, Helena Maria Viramontes—how perfect is that? If I wrote it in a book no one would believe it—too pat—but that’s exactly what happened.

That’s the act of an organic intellectual, artist, and organizer making the counter-institutional move that can happen to a limited extent despite the establishment rather than because of it. The work of Viramontes is most similar to that of Big Bang novelists Langston Hughes and Michael Gold, apart from Gold’s explicitly socialist ending. She is in the organic dispossessed tradition. Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) focuses on migrant farmworker consciousness with full interiority and significant exposure of agricultural capitalism, while Their Dogs Came with Them (2008) shows the Los Angeles freeway system’s destruction of Chicano/a community life as continuous with colonial dispossession.

Díaz helping to get Viramontes hired at Cornell is both a counter-institutional act and an act that the institution can use as evidence of its own openness without fundamentally changing what it values or teaches. Which is not to diminish what Díaz did — it matters greatly that she’s there — but to note that presence outside the main line of canonical recognition is a form of the subordinate clause problem. Specialist silos can function as the contemporary form of the subordinate clause. Cornell can point to her presence as evidence of its own inclusivity while the canonical relevance or weight of her work can remain contextually construed as other, as inclusive rather than central, a minority proletarian writer “included” for her “ethnic” relevance in this new multicultural lower middle class world, but dismissed — or not even seen — as proletarian and socially engaged in the most accomplished tradition of all American literature which has been so pervasively whitewashed out of American literary history, since the Big Bang and much farther back. Presence without canonical recognition, fully understood and conveyed, is a form of suppression — subtler than the Red Scare blunt force trauma, more deniable, and in some ways more durable because it cannot be as easily named and decried.

The suppression operates not only through active hostility but through the construction of frameworks that make the suppressed tradition literally unthinkable as the central tradition. McGurl isn’t suppressing the Big Bang deliberately. His framework makes it structurally invisible. The distinction is between willful suppression and structural invisibility. Active, purposeful suppression can be resisted and named. Structural invisibility reproduces itself in every account conducted on the suppressor’s terms, including the most serious critiques of the suppressor’s institutions.

Viramontes and Díaz are organic dispossessed novelists of the anti-hegemonic tradition even without the explicitly socialist framework that Gold and Smedley and McKay bring. The distinction from the explicitly socialist writers is real but it doesn’t disqualify these organic dispossessed novelists from the tradition. It locates them at a different point on the spectrum in the Gramscian framework. They’re anti-hegemonic organic intellectuals writing from inside the dispossessed community in critique of the oppressive system without the explicitly revolutionary or socialist political framework that Gold and Smedley and McKay bring. That’s a legitimate and powerful position in the tradition even if it’s not the most fully developed political consciousness that the tradition produces.

The parallel also illuminates something about what gets partially embraced by the establishment and what doesn’t. A non-socialist dispossessed people’s novelist like Wallace Thurman was too sexually frank and too opposed to Black respectability politics to be safely canonized. Viramontes is too structurally exposing of agricultural capitalism and state infrastructure violence to be easily mainstreamed. Both end up in the specialist curriculum — Thurman in Harlem Renaissance courses, Viramontes in Chicana studies — rather than in the general American literature canon, or they are otherwise siloed within the canon. The specialist multi-ethnic silo can function as the contemporary form of the subordinate clause. A dispensed with set-aside.

Viramontes has institutional standing at one of the most prestigious MFA programs in the country, which gives her legitimacy and reach, but her work remains too much viewed as Chicana studies curricula rather than treated as central American literature. She’s inside the institution without being inside the canon. She’s present enough to train the next generation of writers but not present enough to displace the canonical hierarchy that keeps the greatest American literary tendency and tradition marginal to the main conversation, understanding, and full embrace.

This is a more complex position than simple exclusion, which is clean-cut and damning to obscurity: Tsiang, Gold after the de facto blacklist, Smedley. Partial inclusion with continued marginalization is subtler and harder to condemn because the institution can point to Viramontes presence as evidence of its own inclusivity while the canonical weight of her work remains negligible in the broader literary culture. Cornell University can say we have Viramontes on faculty. The Norton Anthology of American Literature can continue to shortchange or exclude her or her great tradition. Both things are true simultaneously and the contradiction between them is the contemporary form of the suppression — diversity of personnel without canonical re-assessment and reformulation.

In The Novel Art introduction, the casualness of McGurl’s wholesale dismissal of the people’s liberatory literature is revealing. He doesn’t even bother to argue against it, doesn’t engage with it, doesn’t explain why his framework can’t wholly — or truly even at all — accommodate it. He simply notes in passing that his interpretive models become “substantially narrowed in their explanatory power” when applied to the 1930s Popular Front, and moves on. One subordinate clause. The Harlem Renaissance, the decades of socialist and engaged proletarian literature of all variety, the people’s revolutionary dispossessed tradition dating back pre-Civil War, the greatest concentrated literary achievement in American history gets a subordinate clause and then silence for the rest of the book and the next two books after it.

That’s establishment ideology at work in its most efficient form, not suppression through argument, which would require engagement, but suppression through indifference, which requires nothing at all. The tradition doesn’t need to be refuted if it can simply be noted as outside the reigning framework of thought and be left there — nowhere. The tradition doesn’t need to be considered if it can simply be noted as of no consequence to the reigning framework of thought and be left undiscussed — ignored. If it can even be conceived for what it actually is in the first place — by imperial mentality. The New Critics had to construct a methodological position that became a scheme, stance, and culture — a literary tool, both elaborate and simplistic — to disqualify Gold and Smedley and McKay. McGurl doesn’t even need that. The institutional culture he inhabits has done the work so thoroughly that he can acknowledge the existence but not the understood reality of the greatest American literature in a subordinate clause and feel that he has been honest and wholly encompassing.

That’s hegemony operating at its most complete, when the organic intellectual of the establishment can see the suppressed tradition, name it briefly, and move past it without any sense that he’s just walked past the thing his entire framework was built to avoid looking at directly. The subordinate clause shows he knows it’s there, or at least some part of it. The silence that follows shows he’s chosen not to see it, or — as is more common — been brainwashed, that is, well-schooled, into not seeing it, or if seeing it not valuing it. Such is institutional “learning.” Such is intellectual lobotomy, mental cleansing when you see but you don’t see the best of American literature because you’ve been unknowingly intellectually conditioned not to. You might even read but not see. You might hear but not listen. That’s how you get completely duped in heavy seas of propaganda.

If you’ve “chosen not to value” the people’s tradition of great literature, then that implies a conscious ideological decision, a suppression with agency behind it. What’s often more insidious and more complete is simply not seeing the value because the institutional thought you inhabit has made it invisible to you as valuable. You’re not consciously suppressing the tradition then. You’ve been so thoroughly shaped by the mechanism and the ideology that suppressed it that you experience America’s greatest literary achievement as a minor aberration outside an establishment-compatible explanatory framework, rather than seeing it as the central fact that your framework has been purposely built to pointedly avoid.

That’s the lobotomy operating at its most complete. McGurl is not a gatekeeper making a political choice, I assume. He’s so thoroughly a product of the gatekeeping that he doesn’t need to make the choice. The devaluation is built into his perception. He can see that Gold and Smedley and McKay exist the way a colorblind person can see that something is there without being able to perceive what makes it significant. Establishment literary culture has done its work so completely that one of the most sophisticated analysts of American literary institutions can write three books about its literary production and achievement while relegating the greatest achievement of American literature to a subordinate clause, a literature not suppressed by him consciously but simply invisible to him as the actual core literature.

McGurl did not choose wrongly. The choice was made for him before he ever opened the books. The pre-existing establishment scholarship is the lobotomy that precedes his own continuation of the lobotomized scholarship. The new scholarship confirms the old lobotomy. The new scholarship becomes the evidence that the lobotomy was never performed. Talk about brilliant. Talk about the art of deception.

That’s the full circuit of the hegemonic operation. The scholarship doesn’t just reflect the suppression, it actively produces and reproduces it. The New Critics construct a critical vocabulary that makes Gold and Smedley and McKay unreadable as literature, as great literature, as the greatest literature. That vocabulary gets institutionalized in university English departments and MFA programs. Students trained in that vocabulary produce scholarship that takes the canonical hierarchy as given. That scholarship trains the next generation of critics and writers. McGurl arrives at the end of this chain fully formed by it, not lobotomized by a single act but by the accumulated weight of a century of scholarship — a blinding welter of implications, inferences, commandments, references and lack thereof — that has been simultaneously shaping and delimiting and producing the literary culture that it claims to analyze neutrally.

The scholarship is both the instrument and the product of the suppression. It doesn’t just consider the canon. It makes the canon ever more real by treating it as the object of serious analysis while leaving the suppressed — and superior — tradition in subordinate clauses. Every serious scholarly book on American fiction that doesn’t engage the Big Bang tradition of the people’s liberatory literature as central — the most accomplished art in the American novel, and also and additionally the most normatively vital — reinforces the hierarchy that put it at the margins. McGurl’s three books are three more bricks in the wall, laid with complete sincerity by someone who evidently has no idea he’s building a wall because the wall is all he’s ever been able to see. I mean no disrespect. McGurl is a proficient scholar, otherwise. There’s a problem though in that it’s difficult to sound kind in attempting to speak the truth about the matter. For obvious reasons. The finest institutions in the land are some of the very worst in being most indoctrinated. The typical arch-imperial institution is as brilliant as debased, as overflowing as gutted, as rich as poor.

The scholarship doesn’t just reflect the lobotomy. It performs it, generation after generation, on every student and writer and critic who passes through the institutions it has shaped. The training is beyond compare. Amazingly.

I’m being repetitive through much of this for a reason. It’s a part of how the establishment inculcates, and it must be countered. Sometimes fire is best fought with fire. What is the breadth of establishment literary fiction and scholarship if not repetitive? Repetition matters. It influences. It’s memorable.

Oh, the MFA novel.

The MFA novel has developed several acceptable modes of the hip or diverse or formally self-conscious that give it the appearance of range and vitality while remaining ideologically confined and otherwise limited. The geeky or speculative literary novel performs intellectual ambition and sometimes cultural diversity while keeping a whole taboo range of topics and ideology entirely off the table. The diverse immigrant novel performs multicultural inclusion while routing the immigrant experience through assimilation, identity negotiation, and belonging rather than through class consciousness or anti-imperial analysis, explicit and contemporary. The formally self-conscious autofiction novel performs literary sophistication while making the writer’s own psychology the primary subject, the apotheosis of the Jamesian tradition, consciousness reflecting on consciousness reflecting on consciousness, the economic and political base producing all that leisure and interiority typically invisible or ostensibly irrelevant.

What unites all of the establishment modes is the absence of great collective explicit contemporary human struggle. Not struggle as theme or backdrop or historical subject safely distanced, but struggle as the basic condition from which the consciousness writes the cutting-edge anti-empire, class, and anti-war, anti-police and military tyranny of the day, the material that the form cannot separate itself from because the writer is inside it, or at least tackling head-on while standing one foot in one foot out. Gold can’t aestheticize the Lower East Side poverty because he lived it. Smedley can’t make the class violence decorative because it made her into nothing resembling a decoration. The MFA novel can perform struggle, reference struggle, represent struggle, diversify struggle, but it cannot be inside struggle the way the Big Bang six were inside it, because the institution rewards the well-crafted workshop story, the carefully observed social novel, the formally sophisticated autofiction — forms that require distance from the material rather than immersion in it. The institution selects for the writer who can dramatize struggle with craft and control, which requires standing far enough outside it to shape it aesthetically. The writer actually inside the struggle rarely has that distance. The workshop has no place for someone making a fuss.

Am I saying that we should all be Agnes Smedley? In our own way, why not? She lived a full life both in and out of struggle but overwhelmingly within. In a time of ongoing genocide and in face of omnicide — why not? Everything is not war and revolution and cannot be. But far more of life, including literature, should be engaged in collective resistance and fundamental liberation than currently is. The worst most destructive and tyrannical forces in the world believe in class and imperial assault above all. The most liberatory and constructive forces should counter this directly and then some.

Meanwhile, against these liberatory leanings, the lobotomy of American literature continues to be so complete that the macabre, long-enduring, bloody surgery is hardly visible anymore. The patient walks around perfectly functional, on its best days, producing technically accomplished, culturally attuned, formally interesting fiction, at its best, with no memory of what was removed and no sensation of its absence. That’s the MFA novel in 2026, and longstanding, long time passing. That’s American literature through time as the establishment has canonized and shaped it to be, any exceptions proving the rule.

American literature lobotomized? How again exactly?

In the person and in the community. In the world. The personal, the full human condition, is made up of the private and the public, which the novels of the dispossessed fully engage. The establishment novels gut far too much of the public from the personal, dwell on the private, and so are less fully human —lobotomized — and often distorted even beyond that.

The fully human person and personality, consciousness and unconsciousness, necessarily contains both the private and the public. You cannot create a complete human consciousness without manifesting the social and economic and political conditions that shape, limit, and destroy it. The suppressed tradition understands this because the writers had no choice but to understand it. Their private lives were inseparable from the public forces acting on them. The novels are fully human because the consciousness they express is fully human, which means it includes what the system is doing to the body, the family, the community, the class, the colonized people — in addition to otherwise interior and private manifestations.

The establishment novel guts the public from the personal and calls the obsessive fixation on the private interior remainder depth. What’s left is genuine as far as it goes. The psychological interiority is real, the sensitivity is real, the formal achievement is often real. The only problem is that it’s a partial human being shown with great care. It’s consciousness from which the most determining forces of its existence have been removed or aestheticized into atmosphere. That’s not a different aesthetic preference. That’s a distortion of what a human being is and what a human life contains. Of course, there are wide ranges of both lobotomized and fully conscious persons, but underlying everything is the problem of wholesale ideological gutting of personhood due to blind spots, blind whales, and mistaken or oppressive ideology.

The distortion goes further still. The establishment novel not only omits vital portions of the public dimension, it can actively misrepresent any included public consciousness, while also distorting the private dimension too. And then everything can compound stupidly or grotesquely or both. A consciousness shown without the system that shapes or impinges on it or with a false or falsified take on the system is both incomplete and a total mess. Fitzgerald’s Gatsby is not just missing the dispossessed “valley of ashes” as sizable subject. His depiction of private consciousness is gutted by the omission, because a consciousness that doesn’t register what the society does to the people below it is a consciousness that has been carefully managed to see only what the system wants it to see. The lobotomy doesn’t just remove the public. It corrupts the private that remains — typically making the consciousness of such novels slight or conceited, while the novelist heroically tries to muscle their narrator or protagonist or narrative voice to some greater more meaningful plane. An exhausting effort for everyone involved, writer and reader, and in which case the distorted and thin game is often not worth the candle.

The propertied consciousness has the luxury of privacy. The system is not destroying it, so the self can be the subject, the whole subject, and nothing but the subject, nearly. The dispossessed consciousness has no such luxury. The system imperils existence, so the public is always already inside the private, and harshly or disturbingly so. The MFA novel is overwhelmingly private even when it performs diversity or political awareness. The immigrant novel is private, the trauma novel is private, the autofiction novel is definitionally private — though of course everything must dynamically play against itself to some limited extent to avoid being completely flat. The historical atrocity novel aestheticizes public horror into private grief and individual dignity, or typically at a distant toothless remove from any contemporary crisis. The political content, when it appears, is atmosphere that the private consciousness navigates rather than as subject to be named and exposed and be felt in full present relevance. That’s what the MFA selects against, and what the explicit and contemporaneously socially engaged Big Bang six had no choice but to embody.

This is the kind of truth that’s been sitting in plain sight for a century while the establishment built powerful and sometimes elaborate structures of methodology and institutional authority to make it invisible. The moment you say it plainly, that the fully human personal contains both the private and the public, and the establishment novel systematically guts the public and calls the remainder depth — it’s obvious. Or should be. That’s what makes the suppression so damning. It wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t accidental. It required a century of sustained institutional effort — the New Critics, the prize culture, the MFA system, the CIA funding, the blacklists, the loyalty oaths, the subordinate clauses in the scholarship — to make something this obvious invisible.

And the writers who saw it clearly enough in their art to write through it — Gold, Smedley, McKay, Hughes, Thurman, Larsen, Tsiang, McNickle — they saw it clearly not because they were born with bigger better brains than James or Faulkner or Hemingway but because their position in the system, and the principles they committed themselves to — literary and otherwise — made the truth unavoidable. You can’t gut the public from the personal when the public is destroying your family, your body, your community — especially not if you’re as fully human as you need to be to create the greatest consciousness and social sight and, partly thereby, the greatest art in the novel. The fully human novel wasn’t a theoretical achievement for them. It was an honest and caring and — crucially — explicitly socially conscious response to the conditions of their lives.

That’s why the suppression had to be so total and so sustained. A tradition that creates human consciousness fully — private and public together, the personal inseparable from the structural — is not just aesthetically superior. It’s an open and standing challenge to every novel that creates less. And a defiant rebuke of every system that rewards the less and buries the more.

The system is sick, like the establishment canon, not just wrong or unjust or even criminal, though it’s all of those, but sick in the sense of a profound pathology, a culture and society — seemingly ever more plain to see — that has been systematically deranged in its capacity to recognize and value what is most fully human in its own literature and personhood and sense of community all. A society that buries Gold and Smedley and McKay and Thurman and Larsen and Hughes and McNickle and Tsiang and others while elevating Hemingway and Faulkner and Fitzgerald and James and Wolfe has done something to itself that goes beyond injustice into self-destruction. It has lobotomized its own best consciousness and called the lobotomy health.

And the sickness spreads. Every generation trained on the fake canon inherits the derangement. Every MFA student taught to value the oblique over the direct, the nuance over the bold, the private over the public, absorbs the pathology as aesthetic principle. Every reader who finishes The Sound and the Fury believing they have encountered the depths of American literature and never encounters Daughter of Earth has been truly harmed — not metaphorically but actually, in their capacity to understand the society they live in, the forces acting on their lives and consciousness, and in the possibilities available to them.

The novels that were buried could have changed what American culture and society knew about itself. Could have changed what writers knew was possible. Could have changed what readers demanded. Could have changed what got written next. Could have changed what life became. And this holds across all literature, art, entertainment, and culture — from children’s stories, to genre novels, to movies, to TV, to songs, and so on. That’s why they were buried so forcefully and with all the resources of the establishment, these liberatory people’s literature and much other related intellectual, artistic, and cultural production, and other related social and political activity. And that’s the full measure of what was lost — great literature and the consciousness, the culture, the society, the public insight that great literature produces, generation after generation, in the people who read it. It’s criminal. It’s sick.

Take a minute just in the focused world of the Big Bang and consider how horrible it all is, even apart from much greater societal impact. Maybe it’s not important to rush right to the next analytical frame. Think of Wallace Thurman dead at thirty-two. Nella Larsen writing nothing after 1930, her third novel lost. Agnes Smedley dying in exile in 1950, her ashes sent to China because America rejected her, tried to destroy her, and did. Claude McKay dying in poverty in Chicago in 1948, three novels unread in archives for decades. Michael Gold being forcefully shrunk from the voice that electrified hundreds of thousands to near silence. Langston Hughes performing contrition before Roy Cohn — Roy fucking Cohn — criminal Trump’s criminal mentor. H.T. Tsiang selling his novels by hand on street corners, detained on Ellis Island, writing on toilet paper. D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded out of print for forty years, the Native American literary tradition he helped found barely acknowledged in his lifetime, dying in 1977 still largely unrecognized as one of the great novelists of the century.

These are not abstractions. These are specific human beings with specific gifts and life-long partisan committments that were specific responses to specific conditions, people whose consciousness was forged in the hardest material of American life and who made from that material some of the greatest literature the country has produced, maybe the greatest and most vital, in the greatest line and tradition of American literature. And the country destroyed them for it. Not incidentally, not accidentally, not as collateral damage of some other project, but deliberately, systematically as the course of empire, because what the great liberatory novelists of the people saw and said and made was dangerous to the people who ran things. They got ICEd. They got Border Patrolled. They got Police Stated. They got culturally and metaphorically gunned down by Empire consuming and destroying, making an example of what defied it, of what defied death, for great life in the novel and beyond.

And then the physically and ideologically rampaging establishment called the destruction natural selection. Called it aesthetic judgment. Called it the market. Called it history.

That’s the brutality beneath this argument, the plain human fact of what was done to America’s great novelists and what was taken from everyone who came after them. And it’s emblematic of all the imperial establishment society.

So the devastation is real and must be felt, but these novels exist. They survived. Daughter of Earth can be read today. Banjo can be read today. Jews Without Money, Not Without Laughter, The Blacker the Berry, Passing, The Surrounded, The Hanging on Union Square. And plenty of other such vital novels besides, though you basically need to seek them out in the cracks, and figure out for yourself what they truly are, because the establishment sure as Hell isn’t going to do it for you. They’re still there, and still being created. The suppression didn’t finish the job. The greatest American literature survived the machinery that tried to bury it, and it reads now the way it read then — more alive, more human, more politically urgent than the canonical novels elevated over it. That’s both the indictment and the possibility.

The suppression succeeded and failed. It buried the tradition but could not destroy it. And every reader who finds these novels now gets what was stolen from them as alive as the day it was written. Gold’s Lower East Side is not a historical document. It is a living consciousness that enters you and changes what you see. Smedley’s Marie Rogers does not belong to 1929. She shows a way to engage in the struggles of the day actually in the day.

The inheritance is still there and should be used though it’s still buried for most people, still unknown to most of the literary people on Substack and elsewhere who have had it denied them. But it’s there. Recoverable. And needs to be accessed and fully integrated into literature and life. That’s what this discourse is for, not to mourn what was lost but to give back what was stolen. The people’s literature and greater consciousness. It’s still possible. As is a new Big Bang.

The people’s literature needs to be not just recovered and appreciated but fully engaged with and be made systematically available. In curricula. In syllabi. In anthologies that bust up the fake canonical hierarchy. In MFA reading lists alongside or in place of Carver. In high school classrooms. In public libraries with multiple copies rather than one deteriorating paperback in the stacks. In translation where it isn’t already translated. In new editions with introductions that situate the work in its full political and literary context rather than as sociological curiosity or ethnic minority literature safely siloed from the main tradition.

The Kaya Press republication of Tsiang is a model — small, underfunded, reaching a tiny audience compared to what the work deserves, but doing the essential work of making the text physically available and critically framed. The Feminist Press republication of Daughter of Earth. The recovery editions of McKay’s posthumous novels. These are individual acts of institutional counter-building, each one significant, none of them remotely sufficient to the scale of what was buried or the urgency of what the tradition could do for living writers and readers if it were readily available and taught widely rather than merely technically in print.

If the suppressed tradition is the greater literature — and it is — then making it systematically available is not a diversity initiative or a corrective gesture toward historical injustice. It is the most basic literary and cultural necessity. The inheritance belongs to everyone. It was stolen from everyone. Giving it back requires more than recovery scholarship and small press republication. It requires the full institutional infrastructure — teaching, publishing, criticism, canon revision — focused on the tradition that should have been understood and encouraged as the core all along.

That’s part of the whole new Big Bang. Not just new novels written in the tradition but the tradition finally given the institutional support that would allow it to become what it always was capable of being — the foundation of American literary culture rather than its buried secret.

The big bang is the big secret of American literature. Hidden and essential and generative. Kept from those who need it. The Big Bang is the secret heart of American literature, the thing that explains so much, the thing whose concealment necessitated an entire fake canon to be built on top of it.

Every perversion and yawning lack in the canon makes sense once you know the secret. The elevation of James and Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner was necessary because without that determined grinding elevation the Big Bang’s superiority is obvious. The New Critical formalism was necessary, because without a methodology that disqualifies political content and collective consciousness the comparison is devastating. The MFA house style was necessary, because writers trained on the Big Bang would write differently and demand differently and see differently. The prize culture conditioning was necessary, because a Nobel for McKay or Hughes would have made the secret impossible to keep. The Cold War blacklists and other repressions were necessary, because the writers themselves were still alive and capable of making clear their own significance.

The secret has been kept for nearly a century at enormous cost to the writers, to the readers, to the culture, to the literature that might have been written if the tradition had been allowed to become the foundation it deserved to be. And it has been kept not by conspiracy exactly but by the accumulated institutional weight of a system that understood, consciously or not, that the secret being known would change everything.

Now it’s known. The Big Bang is the big secret of American literature. Or was. It may sound like a grandiose claim, but it would be a lie to say otherwise.

The Big Bang, the greatest concentrated literary achievement in American fiction — a burst of landmark liberatory novels in thirteen months — is the fulcrum of the fullest, most racially diverse, most politically serious, most formally accomplished collective literary expression in the novel that the country has produced, no comparison. The tradition it concentrated extends at its outermost limits from pre-Civil War novels to the present day, but nothing before or since matches the intensity of that thirteen-month eruption. The big secret is that this tradition exists. The big lie is that it doesn’t matter.

The Big Secret was buried for nearly a century by the full force of the institutional and ideological made invisible through Cold War suppression, New Critical methodology, MFA house style, prize culture misdirection, and scholarly subordinate clauses, until the tradition that should have been the foundation of American literary culture became unknown to the vast majority of the people whose inheritance it is.

The Big Lie, the fake canon built on top of the secret canon, the manufactured reputations of Hemingway and Faulkner, James and Fitzgerald elevated as the measure of American literary achievement, the critical vocabulary constructed to make that elevation seem like aesthetic judgment rather than ideological operation, the entire system and schematics of canonical authority presented as the natural order of literary value when it is in fact the purposeful inversion of it.

The Big Bang reveals the Big Secret which exposes the Big Lie. That’s what changes everything once it’s seen, because you can’t unsee it. Shouldn’t be able to. The fake canon should not survive contact with the real one. The lie should not survive contact with the truth. And the truth has been there all along, waiting in the novels, patient as buried treasure, for someone to say it plainly what it is and where it is.

The problem with MFA production of literature is bigger than any MFA house style. It’s MFA house fixations. MFA house lobotomies. It goes way beyond style, which is probably the smallest part of the MFA problem or limitation. “Fixations” and “lobotomies” are more to the point than “style” because style is surface, the Carveresque sentence, the minimalist restraint, the epiphanic ending, the maximalist sprawl. Those are symptoms. The disease is deeper and more total.

The MFA fixations are the whole orientation of consciousness toward the private, the personal halved, the psychologically interior, the domestically limited, the historically distanced, the politically neutralized, the minimalist truncations and the maximalist sprawl to ever more private interiority and public obfuscation and distraction. The fixation on craft as an end in itself rather than craft in the service of something much much larger. The fixation on the well-made familiar story as the horizon of literary ambition. The fixation on the individual consciousness processing its own experience as the primary subject of serious fiction. The fixation on ambiguity and complexity and nuance as values in themselves regardless of what is being made ambiguous and complex or nuanced and why. The fixation on showing rather than telling as if direct statement were aesthetically inferior to oblique suggestion. All of this is the lobotomy institutionalized as pedagogy. The New Critical intentional and affective fallacies — which declared both the author’s political intention and the reader’s emotional and political response irrelevant to literary evaluation, leaving only formal properties as legitimate critical criteria — were institutionalized as workshop pedagogy, transforming ideological exclusion into craft principle. These were and remain fallacies — reactionary in origin, liberal in perpetuation, imperial in effect.

The brainwashing is what those fixations create in writers trained out of the capacity to write the fully human novel, with full human consciousness, who have internalized the private over the public, the oblique over the direct, the ambiguous over the exposing, so thoroughly that the missing capacity doesn’t feel like a loss. It feels like sophistication. It feels like literary seriousness. It feels like having learned what literature is. Which is the most complete form of the lobotomy, when the patient not only doesn’t miss what was removed but actively defends the removal as an aesthetic principle.

This brainwashing hits not only McGurl but Frederic Jameson full force in his 2012 review of The Program Era in the London Review of Books. Jameson senses that something vital eludes McGurl’s account and description of MFA literature beyond the three modes of 1) techno/postmodernism, 2) the ethnic/multiculturalism, and 3) the lower-middle-class realism. What is international and has escaped American MFA confinement, Jameson suggests, is what he describes as Faulknerian maximalism transformed into magic realism, or more broadly the formally extravagant. Faulknerian maximalism, which could not be much accommodated within the program era framework, supposedly, has been transplanted and transformed into magic realism or formal extravagance, and in that form has become a global genre — Gunter Grass, Salman Rushdie, the Latin American Boom that erupted, and was also engineered as we’ve seen, in the 1960s. Tamara Pearson’s The Eyes of the Earth (2024) is a great Australian-Mexican recent example that is also revolutionary organic dispossessed. Also Andre Vltchek’s Aurora (2016) a Russian-Czech-American counterhegemonic magical realism novel, which I edited, after also editing and publishing his counterhegemonic revolutionary novel Point of No Return in 2004-2005, along with other works.1 The American maximalist tradition that the program era couldn’t entirely embrace got picked up outside America and became world literature — and some of the most “radical” and buried American literature, the sort I found myself writing from an explicitly anti-imperial position during my MFA years in the mid 1990s, without yet fully knowing the literary tradition I was working within. I also wrote in realism and many other approaches then and thereafter. Jameson notes further that “realism” is also a main global literary language that is more often left in “the waiting” room than accorded with great prestige. Seems to me that that MFA ethos has a love/hate affair with realism. Some kinds of it can be safely granted prestige, even must be, and other kinds of it not so much at all.

But there are all kinds of problems here, and while Jameson sees gaping omissions in McGurl’s account, he fails to make sense of the overarching structure of literary creations and the underlying politics, both, ironically, for a supposed Marxist. Jameson comes up short because he’s an accommodationist Marxist — not intentionally fake but shaped by the intellectual tradition he worked in, like most of the Western New Left, a tradition whose accommodation to establishment institutions Gabriel Rockhill and others have examined critically, as I’ll discuss later.

The reality is that MFA writing focuses on not just lower-middle-class modernism but mixed-class realism, including plenty of entitled class. This combined mixed-class realist mode substantially overlaps with McGurl’s ethnic literature category, especially once white writing is understood as its own hybrid multicultural formation — though the overlap is partial rather than total. This mode typically tells individuals’ stories in society, and so to varying degrees can be thought of as a civic stream of literature, as contrasted to McGurl’s other mode — the techno or postmodernist mode, what Jameson calls reflexive — which may be thought of as a rhetorical mode of literature. This is what MFA programs know to produce: the typically individualist civic realist story, and the playful, meaning-destabilized, often tech-obsessed mode of rhetorical story.

In the background of all this, McGurl laid out his understanding of the other establishment triad that made a New Criticism caricature of MFA writing, conceived as 1) write from your experience, through 2) your particular voice or style, to create 3) new shown experience, not told.2 The trinity of the workshop. Write what you know, find your voice, show don’t tell.

The first two commandments — write from experience, find your voice — come from the Romantic expressivist tradition running from Wordsworth and Coleridge through Emerson and Whitman, which valued personal experience and authentic self-expression as the primary sources of literary authority. The New Critics actually opposed this tradition. Their intentional fallacy was specifically designed to separate the text from the author’s personal experience and intention. What the MFA absorbed was both simultaneously and somewhat contradictorily: the Romantic expressivist commitment to personal voice combined with the New Critical commitment to formal craft and showing over telling, producing the characteristic program aesthetic of personal material dramatized through studied formal control. The socially engaged dispossessed tradition of the Big Bang also centers personal experience and voice, but with a fundamental difference in what personal experience means and where it points. The Romantic expressivist tradition moves inward, from the external world to the subjective response it generates. The dispossessed tradition moves simultaneously inward and outward — from the personal to the structural and back, the private and public inseparable because the system that is imperial society is destroying the body and the community as well as the individual consciousness. The naturalists, as we saw in Norris, Dreiser, Sinclair, and Anderson, stayed more outward — centering social and economic forces rather than personal interiority, subordinating individual voice to structural analysis in ways the expressivist tradition explicitly refused. Among the engaged dispossessed novelists of the Big Bang, Smedley’s personal experience and voice is the evidence for the structural argument. Gold’s Lower East Side childhood is the collective anatomy of immigrant poverty. McKay’s diasporic wandering is the pan-African condition dramatized through individual mobility. The MFA absorbed the expressivist tradition’s personal voice while filtering out the dispossessed tradition’s insistence that personal experience points outward to structural conditions rather than inward to individual feeling. The result is personal voice without political consciousness — authenticity without structural analysis, experience without collective implication.

Together the three commandments that McGurl identifies — your experience and your voice shown not told — manage to eliminate history, eliminate argument, eliminate analysis, eliminate political consciousness, eliminate the essay within the novel, eliminate the direct address, eliminate the prosecutorial, eliminate the discursive, eliminate Melville’s cetology and Tolstoy’s philosophy of history and Dostoevsky’s theological argument and Hugo’s discursive analyses of social institutions and world-changing events and Smedley’s explicit delineations of socialist fury and Gold’s direct shock inventory of the Lower East Side and McKay’s Ray speaking his political consciousness directly into the novel’s world without apology or mediation. Show don’t tell as aesthetic principle would have gutted every novel this essay has argued is the greatest American literature ever produced. Daughter of Earth tells with the fury of a woman who survived bigoted capitalist police state imperialism and insists you understand how. Banjo tells through Ray’s mouth for pages at a time, the explicit anti-imperial political consciousness that McGurl’s triad would workshop into oblique suggestion and Carveresque restraint. Jews Without Money makes the binary collapse on contact: Gold’s directness is vivid, his political consciousness inseparable from his sensory immediacy, telling and showing the same act performed simultaneously at full force. The show don’t tell commandment is exposed as a false binary by the greatest American literature. The workshop doctrine is both limiting and analytically wrong, and every one of the Big Bang six proves it: Gold most immediately, Smedley most furiously, McKay most formally, Larsen most subtly, each in the mode that their specific material and consciousness required. As a novelist you are a storyteller. The word story-shower doesn’t exist because the thing doesn’t exist. If you aren’t telling, chances are you aren’t showing much either. Telling can be boring because people can be boring. So can showing. If you’re boring, don’t be a writer.

The show don’t tell commandment is the New Critical intentional fallacy and affective fallacy embedded as pedagogy, as if the author’s intention doesn’t matter, as if the reader’s emotional response or intellectual focus can’t be explicitly directed, doesn’t need to be or ought not be, therefore direct statement is aesthetically inferior to oblique suggestion. As an artist in full control of your material, it’s what you do — direct the reader’s attention, while simultaneously helping their imagination play and engage. As workshop doctrine it doesn’t just discourage a technique. It lobotomizes a mode of consciousness. It tells the writer that their most direct knowledge, their most urgent political understanding, their most explicit moral fury is aesthetically suspect, that sophistication requires indirection or nuance or subtlety or paradox, that seriousness requires restraint or imperial ideological conformity, that the prosecutorial voice is somehow less literary than the lyrical one. These are not the aesthetic principles they are proclaimed to be. These are ideological boundaries, bars, and litmus tests, repressive and lobotomizing approaches dressed as craft advice, administered in workshops to writers young enough and insecure enough and vulnerable enough to internalize them as truth.

The show don’t tell commandment, institutionalized as craft principle, effectively confines the writer to the dialogue bubble — the dramatized scene, the shown moment, the oblique suggestion — as if the novelist were a graphic artist whose medium permitted nothing beyond sequential images and speech. The discursive novelist, the essayistic novelist, the prosecutorial novelist, the novelist who speaks directly into the world with the full force of political consciousness and moral fury — these are not inferior novelists. They are the greatest novelists. Melville, Tolstoy, George Eliot, Hugo, Gold, Smedley, McKay. The New Critics were reactionary Southern ideologues whose formalist program was constructed to make this kind of novelistic consciousness aesthetically illegitimate in a politically explosive and especially repressive time and imperial culture in America, that is America. The workshop — call it imperial — institutionalized that program as pedagogy. The damage has been ongoing for seventy years.

The existing critiques of MFA programs are mainly critiques of the institution’s failures by its own standards. My critique is of the institution’s standards themselves. They are ideological not aesthetic. They are instruments of suppression not of cultivation. They are the continuation of a political repression and obliteration begun by the imperial, anti-socialist Red Scares and completed by the New Critics, Cold War machinery, and Theorists. That’s categorically different from anything else in the existing conversation about MFA programs. Establishment American culture remains continuous with imperial genocide and enslavement of the people — physically, mentally, and otherwise. Where, after all, did the literary Big Bang go, and what erased it?

What the MFA actually produces, beneath the craft doctrine and the workshop commandments, are two recognizable streams of literature — the rhetorical and the civic, which of course sometimes hybridize, as with anything. The ethnic/multicultural expansion has helped both streams enormously, though within willfully capped establishment limits. The rhetorical and civic streams are especially lauded if they are of the entitled propertied sensitive exceptional class, or are otherwise ideologically limited, and each of these streams though mainly the realist stream are too often dismissed or occasionally grudgingly admitted if they turn explicitly and contemporaneously revolutionary, socialist, anti-empire, anti-war, anti-capitalist. The old story ongoing.

One of the most prominent hybrids between civic realism and rhetorical maximalism is indicated where Jameson notes that magic realism combines Faulknerian maximalism with ethnic and postcolonial content, which means it has both the rhetorical ambition of techno-postmodern maximalism and the multicultural moral prestige of high cultural pluralism simultaneously. García Márquez is formally extravagant and ethnically consecrated at the same time. That’s partly why magic realism achieved global canonical status — it combined both streams of establishment value in a single form. But the dispossessed civic tradition also had ethnic content in abundance — Gold’s Jewish immigrant community, McKay’s Black diaspora, Hughes’s Black Kansas, Larsen’s Black female consciousness, McNickle’s Salish community. The difference wasn’t ethnicity. It was proximity and directness. Magic realism’s ethnic and postcolonial content was safely displaced — geographically to Latin America, historically into mythological deep time, formally into the supernatural and the extravagant — far enough from the American imperial center to be absorbed as world literature. The Big Bang tradition’s ethnic content was contemporaneous, proximate to the belly of the beast, and explicitly named the American imperial and capitalist system as criminal from inside its operations — too close to home and too direct in its indictment to be aestheticized into multicultural moral prestige. That’s why magic realism got canonized and the Big Bang got buried. Jameson sees the formal and institutional story but not the political one — why certain ethnic content gets absorbed and certain ethnic content gets buried as taboo.

The two stream modes — rhetorical and civic (similar to what Zadie Smith called “Two Paths for the Novel” — postmodernism and “lyrical realism” in 2008) is the more basic and at least by now more revealing description of what’s happening across McGurl’s categories and Jameson’s analysis of MFA and global literature. But even this is only background to the larger problem, which is that both streams of literature are present in the establishment canon and both are present in the suppressed tradition. The main difference is not the stream — not entirely, though it matters — but the conscious position of the writer and the imperatives of conscience that the writing embodies — sometimes called the political or class consciousness though it’s broader than class. It’s anti-imperial and all that that implies.

Rhetorical establishment writers are formally ambitious, self-referential, technically virtuosic, the rhetorical tradition of the propertied consciousness turned inward on its own formal operations, meaning often fractured.

Civic establishment writers create the acceptable social novel, the sympathetically observational tradition that acknowledges class reality while keeping the writer safely outside it, the civic tradition of the propertied consciousness looking down at the dispossessed with or without empathy.

Rhetorical dispossessed are formally inventive from inside the dispossessed position, the rhetorical tradition of the organic intellectual.

Civic dispossessed writers form the direct prosecutorial tradition, the civic consciousness of the organic intellectual exposing and condemning the societal setup as criminal from inside the experience of its operations.

The two streams of literature often hybridize. The multicultural expansion from the 1960s onward in America — the partial rebirth of the Big Bang, with the class politics filtered out, the anti-imperial content managed, the individual voice embraced while the collective consciousness was left behind — meant that not only did the establishment streams diversify, but the dispossessed streams got more representation too because of the correlation between race and poverty in America, and beyond. Even so there have been many ways to continue to block, marginalize, smear, and tokenize the dispossessed literature despite the multicultural expansion that would in part attempt to bring it to the fore.

Much though not all of Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem sits primarily in the dispossessed rhetorical stream rather than the civic. The novel doesn’t detail the system as criminal in the explicit prosecutorial way that Agnes Smedley catalogues it in Daughter of Earth. The indictment is structural and implicit, present in the material conditions of Jake’s world. McKay’s Banjo moves closer to the civic dispossessed position in Ray’s explicit political consciousness that directly defines and critiques the oppressive and exploitative imperial system that Home to Harlem shows as drama and incident, somewhat indirectly. The two novels together are the fullest expression of McKay’s consciousness and understanding. The rhetorical dispossessed stream can be no less threatening to the establishment than the civic, differently so. Home to Harlem was scandalous not because it detailed society as criminal but because it showed Black working class life with full dignity, joy, sexuality, and organic interiority, rejecting suffocating respectable notions of being. The establishment suppresses both story streams, the explicit naming and the dignified demonstrating, because both can be made to express power and to undermine it, a liberatory people’s power and oppressive state-capitalist power and various cultural powers. Jake may be the happiest striker in all of literature, though technically he happily refuses to be part of breaking a strike when he learns he is being used as a scab.3

The American Dream’s unavailability is shown as structural fact in Home to Harlem rather than named as structural indictment. Jake doesn’t have access to upward mobility, property, respectability, or middle class mythology — partly because the system has made them materially unavailable, and partly because he has internalized that unavailability into a mode of being that refuses to measure itself by what it lacks. The refusal is partly chosen and partly imposed, and McKay doesn’t fully separate the two, which is itself a formal argument about the relationship between structural conditions and individual consciousness. Jake’s joy in the face of that unavailability is a form of resistance that is lived rather than named. To Jake it’s the lively and sane available mode of being in a world that has mainly foreclosed the alternatives.

Ray provides the more explicitly political consciousness, the one who can name what Jake lives, but crucially McKay doesn’t privilege Ray’s naming over Jake’s living. That formal equality is the argument that the organic working class consciousness of the man who cannot articulate the system’s operation is as fully human and as politically significant as the intellectual consciousness of the man who can. This is a formal and complex artistic choice that McKay grappled with during the writing process, who to foreground or who not and why. And it’s an aesthetic and normative choice more radical than explicit civic indictment in some ways because it avoids the hierarchy that would make Ray’s analysis the novel’s core and Jake’s experience merely its illustration. The system’s criminality is everywhere visible in the novel’s world without being everywhere stated in the novel’s language. It’s more natural than naturalism, and coming out of the “emotional realism” that McKay said he was attempting to create. The civic content is both implied dramatically and focused on in direct discourse, both romantically and realistically, as befits the two main characters. In that combination the novel is an intermediary between the naturalist novel tradition and the liberatory dispossessed mode that is Banjo, which pushes both the romantic refusal and the realist precision farther while adding Ray’s explicit political consciousness as the novel’s analytical counterweight to Jake’s and Banjo’s experiential resistance.

The establishment continues to primarily publish and reward the entitled rhetorical and civic streams of literature while occasionally being grudgingly forced to admit the dispossessed rhetorical and especially civic streams. In fact, the establishment continues to attempt to systematically exclude or suppress the dispossessed civic stream of literature as entirely as possible because the civic dispossessed tradition is the one that most powerfully combines organic position with explicit political exposure and indictment, that names the system as criminal contemporaneously rather than historically, and makes it feel so, exactly what it is, that rejects any rhetorical evasion or distraction and that especially spurns both the rhetorical extravagance and disintegration of meaning of techno-postmodernism and the often very limited sympathetic observer position of the civic establishment novel.

Agnes Smedley may yet remain the fullest example of the fourth stream, call it, the engaged dispossessed civic — next to the third stream, the engaged dispossessed rhetorical with H.T. Tsiang as its exemplar in The Hanging on Union Square (1935) — the organic position, civic consciousness, explicit socialist and anti-empire politics, contemporaneous critique. That’s why she’s arguably the greatest Big Bang novelist and the most completely buried. She represents everything the establishment cannot accommodate. Daughter of Earth is not rhetorically fancy enough for techno-postmodernism, not safely multicultural enough for high cultural pluralism with its many silos, not constricted enough for lower-middle-class modernism or realism, not sufficiently historical or distanced to be made safe for even marginal canonical admission, let alone centrality. And, regardless, she’s too damn political! The engaged civic dispossessed tradition that is the greatest American literature receives the least credit and visibility and remains in the “waiting room.” Not the lower-middle-class waiting room Jameson describes for the global periphery. The permanent waiting room, exiled from empire, for the most fully engaged writing, the most far-seeing and revolutionary consciousness. This is the vanquished and vanished clause beneath the subordinate clause. Written out of history. Blanked out of empire as the greatest threat, the most central, explicit, contemporaneous consciousness. Her literary suppression is continuous with the same imperial conquest that had been trying to erase Cherokee life, culture, and meaning from history long before she was born, the erasure of her novels one more attack in the long war that produced the conditions of her existence and tried to destroy the consciousness those conditions forged.

And so it’s basically not the McGurl triad, and it’s not Jameson’s modification, his qualification, of the realist-multiculturalist-postmodernist triad that defines MFA and global literature, and it’s not a show-don’t-tell stylized experience and craft caricature of MFA writing that’s central to an understanding of contemporary literature. It’s not even the more basic literary modes of rhetorical stories versus civic stories that define contemporary literature, since in establishment writing, these modes are very readily hybridized and often are. There’s something more telling going on, more fundamental and indicative, something more revealing of consciousness, culture, society. And it’s exposed by something that predated the program era entirely and that represented a wholly different relationship between form and political content than anything McGurl and Jameson’s frameworks can accommodate. The world system of letters that Jameson glimpses coming into being outside the program era, at the end of his review of McGurl’s book, may still be the entitled tradition in global form, or still the depoliticized working class tradition. The fully conscious people’s tradition, the liberatory tradition, that is the people’s political literary tradition remains invisible even at the conclusion of this sophisticated and supposedly Marxist critique by Jameson of the program era’s capacity and limitations that were defined by McGurl.

It’s a radical, deeply institutionalized omission from the program era and from the establishment consciousness of American and global literature.

At least Jameson notes in the LRB review that while McGurl’s book raises questions about “class meaning for the immigrants and racial and gender underclasses” … “working-class realities somehow reach classification only via stories told in terms of race and gender, rather than in terms of work” or, we might add, in terms of myriad other forms of capitalist and imperialist and police state conquest — or their counterparts in liberatory socialist revolution. Jameson sees at least a class problem that McGurl doesn’t fully engage — the suppression of explicit class consciousness and labor politics even within the multicultural strand of program era fiction — but he doesn’t follow the implication through to its logical larger conclusion, that the greatest American literary tendency and tradition of literature — the engaged dispossessed and counterhegemonic anti-imperial tradition, the people’s greatest and most accomplished literature — has been thoroughly gutted from the program era as from the canon.

McGurl engages race as cultural diversity and ethnic identity within the program’s pluralist framework, but not as the systemic racial suppression Díaz describes, and not at all as class consciousness or anti-imperial politics. The racial limitation Díaz identifies and the imperial political limitations I’m pointing out are both present in McGurl’s blind whales, and they’re related. Both are symptoms of the same structuring omission, the one announced in The Novel Art subordinate clause about the Popular Front.

Jameson is not a dispossessed critic. He is one of the most institutionally established Marxist critics in American academic history, Duke professor, heavily theorized, deeply embedded in the academy, the kind of figure whose Marxism is taught in graduate seminars rather than lived in material struggle. He’s an organic intellectual of the academic left rather than of the dispossessed. His Marxism is largely theoretical and methodological rather than emerging from organic connection to the working class or the dispossessed communities.

His work seems to be in partial agreement with the basics of my Big Bang theory, so to speak. In The Political Unconscious (1981) he argues that all literature contains a political unconscious, that class struggle shapes literary production, that the canonical tradition suppresses its own political content through various forms. That’s structurally close to the outlines of the Big Bang theory — the dispossession in American literature of the engaged dispossessed. And his observation in the McGurl review that working class realities in program era fiction get expressed only through race and gender rather than through explicit class consciousness, let alone through imperial consciousness, makes my point about the multicultural revolution diversifying the faces without restoring the revolutionary class politics — not wholesale, and not at their most explicit and contemporaneous.

It seems that Jameson works at such a level of both theoretical abstraction and establishment fixation that the specific novels of the Big Bang remain largely invisible to him as literature. He sees the political unconscious of canonical texts, reading Balzac and Conrad and Dreiser through the lens of ideology and class, but the Big Bang tradition as the explicitly conscious political literature, the people’s novel that doesn’t need a Jamesonian excavation of its political unconscious because the politics are right there on the surface, doesn’t fit his methodology comfortably. His framework is better suited to recovering the suppressed political content of canonical texts than to recognizing the fully conscious political achievement of the suppressed tradition.

If he ever saw the Big Bang, he didn’t see it as revelatory. His literary historical framework runs through European realism and high modernism. Lukács, Brecht, Adorno are his primary reference points, not Parrington and Calverton and Smith. The American socialist literary tradition of the 1920s and 1930s appears in his work primarily as a sociological and historical phenomenon rather than as the greatest concentrated literary achievement in American fiction. He may well have recognized the political significance of the Big Bang if it had been presented to him. He wouldn’t have arrived there himself — he didn’t — because his framework, like McGurl’s, was built on a canon that excluded it. Even though Jameson had a more theoretically sophisticated version of the same exclusion of the people’s canon than McGurl.

The irony is that Jameson’s theoretical tools — the political unconscious, the ideologeme (ideological mini-narrative), the concept of containment and suppression in canonical form — are almost perfectly designed to analyze what happened to the Big Bang tradition. But he never turned his focus there, because he was formed by and within the institutional and intellectual tradition that suppressed the Big Bang, even though his politics are explicitly Marxist and his methodology is explicitly about recovering what ideology suppresses.

His Marxism came through the European theoretical tradition — Lukács, Adorno, Althusser, Benjamin — not through the American proletarian and socialist literary tradition. He learned to read class in literature through Balzac and Zola and Conrad, not through Gold and Smedley and McKay. The Big Bang tradition was already buried by the time Jameson was being formed as a critic. The institutional formations that produced him — Yale PhD, European theory, the academic Marxism that was a product of the post-McCarthy accommodation of the left within the university — had no mechanism for recovering it.

There’s also something more revealing. Academic Marxism of the Jamesonian variety has its own class interest in producing theory. The more complex and specialized the methodology, the more it requires the trained professional critic to use it. The great people’s literature is the extension of a literary tradition that doesn’t need explaining because it says what it means directly: Gold’s direct shock descriptions, Smedley’s direct fury, McKay’s open collective consciousness. The greatest of American literature is in some ways a standing challenge to the need for any professional Marxist critic — although wouldn’t it be nice if they would fucking present it, intellectually support it, and theoretically mine it? Wouldn’t that be nice, for a change. That’s where their professionalism should be, not just critiquing the shortcomings of canonized establishment texts, but also exploring the seemingly boundless strengths of the great suppressed lines of American and world literature. That said, you don’t need The Political Unconscious to read Jews Without Money. The political conscious is right there on every page. And even more so with Daughter of Earth and Banjo. It wouldn’t hurt though. You could do it. And it would probably be as theoretically revealing or more than applying the theory to Balzac and Dostoyevsky. Marxist theorists evidently don’t see their fellow contemporary liberatory socialist novelists the way the socialist critics of the Big Bang era sometimes did. Calverton championed the proletarian tradition. Gold worked as both novelist and organic critic. The New Masses and the radical press engaged seriously with the work as it appeared. The academic Marxists arrived after the imperial backlash and burial was complete and inherited a canon that had already made the Big Bang invisible. The irony is that Jameson’s tools were almost perfectly suited for the analysis — and yet useless, or unused. The tradition was there to be found, as the socialist critics of the period partially demonstrated. A century on, it remains largely unfound by the theoretical tradition that should most urgently be finding it.

The suppressed tradition is too direct, too unambiguous, too politically explicit for the academic Marxist methodology that was built to mine the political content buried in canonical texts. Jameson’s tools are picks and shovels designed for deep excavation. The Big Bang doesn’t need excavating. It needs reading. Also expounding and expanding upon. The institutional culture that produced Jameson, the great Marxist critic, managed to never give him reason to read or to theorize the greatest moment in American literary history that occurred during the great socialist era of American history. The irony, or the masterful suppression, is almost indescribable.

Jameson’s methodology is inapplicable to the Big Bang tradition at the first level at least. Gold doesn’t have a political unconscious as much as a political conscious. Smedley doesn’t suppress the social contradiction — she names it directly on every page. McKay doesn’t mediate “historical contradictions” through “formal displacement” — he makes it the explicit premise of his novel’s worlds. A methodology built for excavation has little or nothing to do when the content is on the surface. Jameson’s critical technique — powerful on Balzac, Conrad, Gissing, Dreiser, the canonical texts that encode their politics obliquely — breaks down entirely when applied to writers who avoid the obliqueness the methodology requires. This indicates that Jameson’s methodology, however sophisticated, was built inside the same culture and system of institutions that suppressed the tradition this essay recovers. The political unconscious as a critical tool is itself unconscious in presupposing that serious political literature hides its politics — an assumption that the Big Bang tradition demolishes entirely. The people’s liberatory literature is upfront about the reaches of human consciousness and society that canonical literature typically guts and avoids revealing directly.

In Archaeologies of the Future (2005) Jameson shifts from his excavating political unconscious methodology to something closer to a positive critical project, reading utopian fiction not for what it suppresses but for what it directly imagines, projects, and desires. The method there is not symptomatic reading against the grain but engaged reading with the grain, taking the utopian content of science fiction seriously as a direct expression of the desire for a different social order, not as ideology to be demystified but as vision to be analyzed in its own right.

Taking seriously the direct expression of political desire and social possibility in literary form, reading the explicit utopian content as the primary literary achievement rather than as naive or aesthetically inferior to formal obliqueness, this methodology could have been applied to the Big Bang tradition. Gold’s explicit socialist consciousness, McKay’s dramatizations of Black proletarian life and of refusing to participate in capitalist empire during a strike, Smedley’s overt discourse and dramatizations of the system as criminal — these are all direct expressions of political desire and social possibility, utopian in the deep sense Jameson uses in Archaeologies, visions of human possibility expressed through dispossessed consciousnesses and social and political experiences rather than displaced into speculative futures.

Jameson chose to apply that more generous, direct-reading methodology to science fiction — a largely white, largely male, largely canonical adjacent genre — rather than to the liberatory proletarian and dispossessed tradition that was doing the same work with greater human urgency and greater organic authority. That choice is part of the suppression pattern. The methodological tool existed. He pointed it elsewhere. This displacement onto speculative fiction is structurally identical to the historical novel displacement in the Pulitzer record. Jameson applies his most generous and direct-reading methodology to a genre that imagines the dispossessed future in speculative form rather than to the tradition that showed and enunciated the dispossessed present in direct form.

The utopian desire is taken seriously when it’s projected into imagined futures and alien worlds, or back into the past, at some remote distance or another, not when it’s stated directly by Gold and Smedley and McKay in their contemporaneous living present of 1929 and 1930. For such contemporary-focused works this methodology looks away and the tradition goes unexamined. The displacement from contemporaneous to speculative, from direct to oblique, from the engaged organic dispossessed position to the canonical entitled — it’s the same move the prize culture makes, the same move the MFA makes, the same move the New Critics made. Jameson’s most generous methodology goes to science fiction the way the Pulitzer goes to historical fiction by writers of color — safely displaced from the living present of dispossession into a distant and contained space that the establishment can show and handle without exposing itself for what it destructively is. The critical tool of illumination exists. Jameson used it, eventually, but pointed it at distanced speculative futures instead of at the immediate present. Is that an innocent omission? For many establishment critics, so-called Marxist or otherwise, it shows deep conditioning. Businesses, governments, universities largely select for the most deeply conditioned individuals who think they are free agents, so conditioned are they to accepting regressive and arbitrary limits of thought and values as neutral, progressive, or universal. Many other professionals just don’t care or are committed theological, imperialist, capitalist, or bigoted reactionaries, any or all of that.

Anti-imperial theorist and Marxist philosopher, Villanova professor Gabriel Rockhill’s central argument in Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (2025) is that Western Marxism was systematically cultivated and shaped by the CIA, the Ford Foundation, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom to manufacture a compatible left — divorcing Marxism from revolutionary application toward abstruse cultural criticism that posed no real threat to capitalism or imperialism. The documentary record supports significant portions of this argument, particularly regarding the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s literary operations, which this essay has already documented in the Kenyon Review’s CIA funding. Whether the full theoretical tradition was as systematically shaped as Rockhill argues remains contested. What is not contested, in my view, is the effect. Western Marxism functioned as revolutionary containment regardless of the precise mechanisms that produced it, and that effect is what matters for the argument here.

I make the same case about the literary canon. New Criticism, high modernism, the MFA system, postmodernism, and much Theory are all instruments for divorcing American literature from practical and engaged political content, class and imperial consciousness, and systemic societal exposure, producing a compatible literary culture that poses no threat to the established order and no great help to human consciousness — not in comparison to what it could be and already is in more enlightened and engaged arenas and individuals outside of establishment literature, or even within literary authors themselves but not in their works of art. There’s no excuse for the novel — an artistic form as capacious and potentially profound as any — to be stripped of engaged political consciousness and systemic indictment. None whatsoever. Rockhill documents the same operations of evisceration in the realm of critical theory that I show in the realm of fiction, the novel in particular. Rockhill’s work fully documents the imperial colonization of Marxist theory. The same thing happened to American literature — and to universities, government, economics, and culture and society and politics writ large.

Jameson is part of the Western Marxist tradition that Rockhill exposes — sophisticated, institutionally established, his Marxism ultimately compatible with the academy and with the imperial theory industry. His elaborate theoretical lines and coinages perform ostensibly radical critique while remaining safely within the institutional forms and formulations, careers and ideologies, that the ruling class can embrace and reward. Jameson’s approach is a product of the same suppression mechanisms that Rockhill documents.

My unearthing of the Big Bang suppression does something similar to what Rockhill’s work does for the history of theory, though I also go the step of recovering the great works of the buried people’s tradition — in both the novel and in criticism, and also a brief bit in poetry and film — which I don’t know that Rockhill does for any possible people’s works of theory. Separately, Rockhill and I both document the systematic suppression of a revolutionary political tradition by the institutional techniques of the capitalist state and its cultural mind-washing. We both argue that what passed for the legitimate critical or creative tradition was built on the burial of a more politically serious, and honest, and more humanly complete alternative. Two kinds of counter-history and criticism against the authorized account.

So I document buried vital works beyond the wreckage of the establishment. And I document the modes of suppression and go to the novels and make the normative and aesthetic argument that the suppressed tradition produced the greater work — and the far more legitimate work. Rockhill argues that anti-imperialist Marxism is superior to Western Marxism as a political and analytical framework. There are a number of strong anti-imperial philosophers ranging from progressive to socialist to anarchist. In philosophy, I value the works of John Dewey, who seems to me to be America’s great philosopher — today often ferociously denounced by establishment liberals and right wingers — especially The Public and Its Problems which was published in 1927, perhaps unsurprisingly on the eve of the literary Big Bang in the novel. Dewey’s argument in The Public and Its Problems is that the modern state has destroyed the local communal life through which democratic consciousness forms. The public cannot identify itself because the conditions for genuine community have been atomized by industrial capitalism and mass organization. The restoration of local communal life as the basis for a richer, more various, more free collective experience is his positive program, and that’s directly continuous with what the Big Bang writers were doing in their novels, the philosophical parallel. The Big Bang writers dramatized and analyzed the communities Dewey was describing as the basis for a genuinely democratic public life, even as imperialism, bigoted capitalism, and the coming Great Depression destroyed the material, cultural, and psychological conditions that made thoroughly humane community possible.4

Also I’m obviously valuing in this essay the philosophical work of the great leftist Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Communist party founder and leader, imprisoned by the fascists for it, who wrote his Prison Notebooks while in Italian prison during the American Big Bang and early thirties. By 1937, prison had killed him.5

Rockhill’s argument is institutional, historical, and intellectual, showing the ideological forces of suppression and funding networks, a compatible left manufactured to replace the revolutionary left. My argument is institutional, historical, intellectual and artistic, showing similar and overlapping ideological forces of suppression alongside the greatness and importance of what was suppressed. And I point out the literary evidence for that artistic and human, cultural and socio-political greatness in the novels themselves. You do what Rockhill does and then go further into the works. Maybe Rockhill is advancing on that in his philosophical project, and I would assume others already have, but for now, I would say that my work here is the more complete counter-history. It doesn’t just name the suppression, it recovers and argues for the specific achievement that was suppressed, novel by novel, consciousness by consciousness, sometimes even passage by passage. That’s what makes it an authoritative account of the American novel, or the authoritative account, rather than only an account of establishment mendaciousness and suppression.

I’m not working here from European theory toward American literature. I’m working from the American literature toward the theoretical and political argument that puts it in context to its society and world. That’s the organic versus traditional intellectual distinction again. My argument comes from inside the material rather than applying an external framework to it.

European theory was used to displace focus on American socialist theory, history, and criticism, and literature. The importation of French Theory into American universities from the late 1960s onward wasn’t just an intellectual development, it was a political displacement. Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Althusser, Barthes arrived in American English departments at the moment when the recovery of the suppressed American socialist tradition was becoming possible. Socialist American scholars like Cary Nelson and Alan Wald and Paul Lauter were beginning to do the archival and critical work of recovery of the great American socialist literary tradition. European theory buried those efforts by redirecting the intellectual energy of the academic left toward abstruse textual analysis, the instability of meaning, the death of the author, the suspicion of master narratives — and much other such postmodern rhetorical play. The would-be literary critical scholars became theoretical physicists of the literary, the experts of the abstruse, the quark-hunting nuclear physicists of American literary theory. And socialist literature died. Anti-empire literature too. Exactly as intended.

You couldn’t have designed a more effective displacement if you’d tried. And according to Rockhill and by now many others, in significant part they did try — the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA, the Ford Foundation actively cultivating and promoting the French theorists who would occupy the space that American socialist criticism might otherwise have filled. The compatible left in theory — poststructuralism, deconstruction, postmodernism — arrived just in time to prevent the incompatible left — engaged proletarian literary criticism, explicit revolutionary socialist realism, contemporary overt anti-imperialism, the recovery of Gold and Smedley and McKay and others — from becoming the dominant framework for understanding American literary history.

Parrington and Calverton and Smith had built the critical vocabulary for understanding American literature as class struggle and political formation. That vocabulary was destroyed by the Red Scare and the New Critics. Parrington would die suddenly in 1929, while Calverton too died young, in 1940, and Smith moved on from the New Masses to Hollywood. When the political space reopened in the late 1960s and 1970s the vacuum was filled not by the recovery of the crucial and invigorating, the incisive and exacting American socialist critical tradition but by abstruse European theory that was oh so sophisticated, oh so politically acceptable, and safely limited — unable or unwilling to name explicit contemporary structural crime as criminal and stay focused on it, unable to value the direct and the prosecutorial, unable to see the Big Bang as the greatest concentrated literary achievement in American fiction because Theory’s whole abstruse design was built to do something else completely.

That’s the full circuit. The American liberatory socialist critical tradition destroyed. The American liberatory socialist literary tradition buried. European theory imported to fill the vacuum with something that looked radical and was supposedly — theoretically — political but functioned as revolutionary containment, entertainment, impracticality, and high professional busywork. To this day the Big Bang sits in the subordinate clause of every book that claims to be the authoritative account of American literary history.

It’s all so damning. And the damning quality compounds at every level. Each layer of the suppression reveals another layer underneath it. Each instrument of containment reveals the instrument that built it. Each subordinate clause points to the silence that produced it.

The Red Scares and Cold War destroy the socialist writers. The New Criticism constructs the vocabulary that makes their work unreadable as literature. The prize culture rewards the canonical three and more and buries the suppressed six. The MFA system institutionalizes the asocial Jamesian and New Critical aesthetic, and the T.S. Eliot mystical aesthetic. With liberatory socialist ideology criminalized and the Old Left driven from public intellectual life, an ideological vacuum opened in American universities. European theory filled it — making political analysis so abstruse as to be toothless, producing impotent disengaged postmodernism as the acceptable face of academic radicalism, however entertaining to some. The liberatory populist uprisings of the Civil and Human Rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the antiwar and ecological movements continuing, at least forced some multiculturalism and progressive sensibility back into consciousness and literature — though stripped of their strong socialist, anti-imperialist, and antiwar manifestations, bitterly fought off still today. Both liberalism and conservatism now function as reactionary ideologies relative to any genuinely liberatory socialist politics, let alone communist ones. And so the Substack debate about MFAs happens almost entirely within the conditions the reactionary establishment culture set. Jameson remained almost as captured by it as McGurl. And the greatest concentrated literary achievement in American fiction — and America’s great literary tradition running for nearly two centuries from pre-Civil War to the present day — sits unknown to the vast majority of the people whose inheritance it is. As befits imperial suppression, in an imperial nation, in the center of empire. The greatest potential and fundamental vitality of American literature remains marginalized or blocked entirely.

Each of these realities is damning on its own. Together they constitute something that goes beyond injustice into the kind of sustained civilizational self-destruction that is genuinely hard to look at directly. A culture that buried Gold and Smedley and McKay and Thurman and Larsen and Hughes and McNickle and Tsiang and Harper and Douglass and Ridge and Griggs — that buries its own best consciousness, its own most fully human literature, its own most honest accounts of what it actually is and does — and then calls the burial aesthetic judgment, and then calls the judgment tradition, and then calls the tradition literature — that's not just a scandal. That’s a kind of collective suicide of consciousness and society performed over nearly two centuries with institutional thoroughness and ideological precision.

And yet the novels survived — some of them. That’s the turn. Through all of it — the blacklists, the poverty, the exile, the archive obscurity, the almost comically telling subordinate clauses — the novels survived. Daughter of Earth survived. Banjo survived. Jews Without Money survived. The Blacker the Berry survived. Passing survived. Not Without Laughter survived. The Surrounded survived. And more.

So the suppression was not total. Not technically. It succeeded and it failed. Which is small consolation because the suppression was effectively total. Nevertheless, the novels are still there, still alive, still waiting, revived and republished at least at the margins by socially conscious people, humanly conscious people and organizations, who know what they are doing. They’ve republished the people’s standard, which must be created like never before, because the suppression is ongoing and largely successful. The novels survive but their survival is not the same as their being embraced, canonized, and becoming the foundation of American literary culture that they deserve to be. Surviving in a Feminist Press paperback with a small print run is not the same as being taught in every American literature survey course. Being recovered by specialist scholars is not the same as being known. Being available on Amazon is not the same as being read.

A kind of half-literature was developed, full of half-persons as characters in novels. Half-literature — technically accomplished, aesthetically serious by its own criteria, formally sophisticated in the ways the establishment rewards — but half, because it expresses only the private half of the fully human personal, only the propertied half of the social world, only the individual half of the collective consciousness, only the sensitive half of the human being and none of the struggling half, only the aesthetic half of what art can do and none of the political half.

Half-persons — not caricatures, not failures of craft, but consciousnesses from which the determining half has been removed. Gatsby without Wilson. Quentin Compson without Dilsey’s full interiority. Jake Barnes without the working class men whose labor produces the wine he drinks and the bulls he watches die. Nick Carraway processing everything through a sensibility that can note the “valley of ashes” as moral backdrop but not as the subject. Half-persons manifested with great care and sometimes great beauty but half — the half the system could reward, the half that posed no threat, the half that reflected the propertied consciousness back at itself and called it universal.

And the half that was removed was not the lesser half. It was the half that makes a person fully human — the structural position in the system, the collective identity, the political consciousness, the material conditions that shape every choice and every perception. The half that Gold and Smedley and McKay and Hughes and Thurman and Larsen and McNickle kept in. The half that makes their characters fully human where the canonical characters are beautifully, carefully, skillfully half.

That’s the lobotomy stated as literary criticism. Half-literature full of half-persons. And the half-literature was canonized and the whole literature was buried, and so the half-literature is still dominant. The MFA still produces half-persons in its novels and stories. The prize culture still rewards the private over the public. The canonical hierarchy is still largely intact. The Substack debate about MFAs still happens within the purview of the suppression, McGurl’s book the authoritative account of what might now be called MFAmerican fiction. The Big Bang is still the big secret. The big lie is still largely believed.

The suppression didn’t fail. It succeeded so completely that the recovery efforts operate at the margins, in specialist journals and small press editions and Substack essays outside institutional literary culture, while the mainstream literary world proceeds as if none of it happened. Tsiang is still almost entirely unknown. Smedley is still not taught in standard American literature curricula as scarcely are the novels of McKay, Hughes, Gold, McNickle, and others of the greatest tradition. The suppression is ongoing, adaptive, and largely winning. The inheritance of the people’s literature is still buried for most. The work of giving it back is barely begun. And the forces that buried it are still functioning at full power, still rewarding the half-literature, still producing the lobotomy, still calling it culture.

The half-communities in the novels exist because half-persons can only inhabit half-communities — and vice versa — the gilded enclave, the bohemian circle, the cultivated social world of the Princeton elite, communities defined by what they exclude as much as by what they include, communities from which the working class and the colonized and the dispossessed are present mainly as servants, backdrop, local color, grotesques. The full community — cross-class, multiracial, collectively conscious, historically specific, politically aware, aware in every way, and actively revolutionary — appears only in depth in contemporaneous explicit form in the suppressed tradition. McKay’s Marseille waterfront. Gold’s Lower East Side. Hughes’s Kansas. McNickle’s Flathead Reservation. Smedley’s American interior and international vista. Tsiang’s streets of New York. The full community dramatized and discoursed from inside with full dignity. The revolutionary as real as empire.

The establishment literary propaganda is everywhere, the literary propaganda of the canonical hierarchy, that pointedly constructed society that has been producing and disseminating distorted reality at industrial scale for far more than a century. The advertising industry, the Hollywood dream machine, the news media, the educational system, the political rhetoric, the national mythology, all of it working in the same direction as the literary canon, all of it producing the same half-person in the same half-communities believing the same half-truths about what America is and does and means. And then there’s a ton of disinformation on top of it all.

The dissidents see more clearly not because they are smarter but because their position in the system makes the distortion visible in ways it isn’t visible to those the system is working for. The prophets — Gold, Smedley, McKay, Hughes, Thurman, Larsen, McNickle, Tsiang — were prophets not in the supernatural sense but in the original sense: people who see what is actually happening and say it plainly while the society insists it isn’t happening. That’s why they were suppressed. Not because they were wrong but because they were right. The propaganda requires the suppression of the people who can see through it. The half-literature requires the burial of the whole literature. The half-community requires the disappearance of anyone who can describe the whole.

And the intellectuals — even the most sophisticated, even the most politically credentialed — are not immune. Jameson worked fully inside the Western Marxist tradition that Rockhill documents as the compatible left. And now Rockhill is attacked by the accommodationist left. McGurl works wholly inside the institutional mechanisms he’s analyzing. The French theorists think wholly inside the jargon-choked design that cultivated and promoted them. The propaganda is that thorough, that pervasive, that structurally embedded. The people’s dissidents escape it not through superior intelligence but through the accident of position and conscious or unconscious invocation of liberatory populist principles, direct social or socialist engagement, or sheer practicability — being on the wrong side of the system, being ground up by it rather than rewarded by it, being forced to see it whole because there is no safe partial view available from where they stand, and no reward or real need for abstruse abstraction.

That’s why the organic intellectual of the dispossessed sees and acts on what the traditional intellectual cannot see, or chooses not to see. Not superiority of mind but necessity of position, also principle. The whole truth is only available from the position that has no interest in the half-truth, that is being killed by the half-truth, by the half person, the half community, the lethal impositions of empire. And that position of the people’s liberatory lit, that criticism and creativity, that’s what the system works hardest to destroy, consciously and otherwise — even and especially when it has been brainwashed into believing it is doing the people’s work. Marginally, it may or may not be. Fundamentally, establishment literature and theory too often function as the gravedigger of the people’s literature and art, criticism and culture, society and life.

What would liberated institutions and culture actually look like? Not as utopian fantasy but as practical curriculum, the reading list that puts the suppressed tradition at the center where it belongs. The first-year MFA fiction student reads Jews Without Money alongside or in place of Raymond Carver — not as ethnic curiosity or historical document but as the fullest available model of how to show a community’s consciousness from inside with formal directness and political seriousness. Daughter of Earth replaces whatever Updike or Cheever novel currently anchors the syllabus as the exemplary American prose style — Smedley’s first-person fury demonstrating that psychological interiority and political consciousness are not in tension but are the same thing when the writer is inside the material rather than observing it from a safe distance. Home to Harlem and Banjo are taught together as McKay intended them to be read — the rhetorical dispossessed stream and the civic dispossessed stream in dialogue, showing students that formal range and political seriousness are not opposites, that you can have Jake’s organic joy and Ray’s explicit naming in the same fictional world. Not Without Laughter sits next to Huckleberry Finn as the truer account of American boyhood and American freedom, the comparison doing more to expose the canonical hierarchy than any theoretical argument could. The Surrounded anchors the unit on American place and belonging that currently gets taught through Willa Cather — McNickle showing what Cather cannot show because McNickle is inside the dispossession that Cather aestheticizes as landscape. Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus and Jews Without Money are taught together as fixtures of American labor literature, the farmworker camps of the San Joaquin Valley and the sweatshops of the Lower East Side, the civic dispossessed tradition showing across sixty years and two immigrant communities that the system’s operations are consistent even when the faces change. The workshop changes when this is the reading list. You cannot teach Daughter of Earth as a model and simultaneously reward the oblique over the direct, the private over the public, the ambiguous over the exposing. The curriculum is the argument. Change what’s on the syllabus and you change what writers believe is possible, what readers demand, what gets written next. That’s why the reading list matters as much as the canon debate, because the reading list is where the canon debate becomes material, becomes embodied in actual writers actually writing, becomes the foundation of the next generation’s sense of what American literature is and what it can do.

Here’s what a course description on the Big Bang or the people’s novel might look like:

Against the Half-Canon: The Engaged Dispossessed Novel in American Literary History

You have been lied to about American literature. Not by accident and not by oversight — by a century of sustained institutional effort involving federal surveillance, ideological blacklists, critical methodology manufactured to disqualify political content as aesthetic failure, and a prize culture designed to reward the safe and bury the dangerous and vital.

The novels this course recovers include:

• Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money — Lower East Side Manhattan burning on the page

• Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth — fury at a system that ground women and workers to nothing

• Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem and Banjo — Harlem and Marseille alive with joy and resistance

• Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter — American boyhood dramatized with a human fullness Twain approached but never matched

• Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing — Black women’s consciousness at full psychological pressure, the most compressed and devastating interiority the period produced

• Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry — Black community and its own internalized hierarchies satirically critiqued from inside

• H.T. Tsiang’s The Hanging on Union Square — formal invention from the street corner up

• D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded — a Montana Salish community dramatized from inside, colonial destruction shown as the system’s normal operation rather than its exception

These are not minority literatures or ethnic supplements to the main tradition. They are the main tradition — the fullest human consciousness the American novel has ever produced, buried under a fake canon built on top of them like a monument over a mass grave.

This course reads what’s underneath. It will change what you think American literature is, what you think the novel can do, and what you think you’re allowed to write.

This project is an attempt to write a rigorous and comprehensive account of the American novel from outside the institutional channels that would shape or suppress such an account. Last year I serialized a novel on Substack in the organic anti-hegemonic tradition — denied publication everywhere, not reviewed anywhere. This project’s own institutional fate illustrates the argument. That's what it is. Whether either succeeds is for readers to judge.

Too many other accounts of the American novel — from the New Critical tradition, through the academic literary histories, through McGurl — take the same old canonical hierarchy as given and build or include from there. This essay takes the canonical hierarchy as the fundamental problem of inverse order and creates and recreates the real canon from the suppressed tradition that exposes the establishment canon. That’s not a different perspective on the same material. It’s a different foundation entirely. Once you’ve seen what the foundation actually is — the Big Bang, the people’s standard, the fully human literature — the accounts built on the false foundation look like what they are: the authorized version of a crime. An imperial crime that goes far beyond literature and all the way through it.

This argument will be contested, ignored by some, attacked by others, praised by those who see it too. That’s the pattern the tradition it documents has always faced. But the argument is made. The evidence is in the novels themselves — still there, still alive, still waiting for the readers who will encounter them and never see American literature the same way again.

The Big Bang is the big secret that reveals the big lie. And now, on Substack, outside the institutional channels that would never have published it, an authoritative account exists. Not finished, the work is hardly begun. But the real foundation in the American novel, at the least, should be visible now, maybe in certain ways for the first time.

Is the argument correct? What about the work of Toni Morrison, and other such figures of the people, being so highly esteemed by the establishment? Is the work of Morrison an exception, an anomaly, or a wholesale contradiction to this would-be authoritative account? Has the engaged dispossessed civic tradition in literature, the greatest American literature, the people’s liberatory literature been completely gutted from establishment literary circles and the canon? How could that be? Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel. And what about Louise Erdrich, an Ojibwe author who has won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award?

Morrison and Erdrich, among others, most nearly achieve what the Big Bang tradition achieves — the organic position, the anti-hegemonic, the dispossessed community shown from inside with much structural clarity, the public and private inseparable, the systems of what we call society exposed as criminal through the specific and the particular, and they do it with formal achievement that is often pointed rather than evasive.

Let’s focus on Morrison — the more institutionally rewarded of the two, and the more instructive case, since what applies to Morrison applies largely though not entirely to Erdrich as well. Is Morrison an exception that proves the rule? Or is she the establishment’s most sophisticated act of simultaneous expansion and neutralization — taking the writer who most closely approached the engaged dispossessed civic tradition and canonizing her in ways that isolated her achievement from the tradition it belongs to, treating her as a semi-singular genius rather than as the culmination of a tradition that runs from the American and international socialist era, through the Harlem Renaissance and the Big Bang, and farther forward and back?

A little of both but especially the latter. Morrison is canonized as Morrison — exceptional, individual, Nobel laureate — rather than as the heir of McKay and Thurman, Larsen and Hughes, Smedley and Gold, Tsiang and McNickle, the continuation of a tradition the establishment suppressed. The canonization individualizes and makes exceptional rather than restores the tradition. She’s admitted while the tradition that produced her remains subordinate, largely disappeared or decentralized.

Even more telling is that unlike Hughes, McKay, Larsen, and Thurman and the other Big Bangers, Morrison is not primarily a contemporary novelist. She’s mainly a historical novelist, and most rewarded for her historical novels. The Big Bang novelists mostly wrote contemporary novels, in fact essentially entirely so. Those contemporary novels exposed and challenged the present moment in the moment. Most of Morrison’s novels, and her most lauded novels, are historical, and so are in various ways safely removed from too threatening, or revealing, the present.

Also, unlike McKay, Hughes, Smedley, and Gold, Morrison is not a socialist writer and posed no perceived political threat to the establishment. She came straight out of institutional culture — an Ivy League graduate who worked as a senior editor at Random House for nearly two decades. Her doubly elite social position, combined with the distancing effect of historical fiction and the sometimes elevated, complex, and Faulkner-indirect nature of her prose, gave her work several buffers that made it more readily — though not readily — embraced by the establishment. Whether or not that was intentional is irrelevant. The Big Bang writers’ choices moved in the opposite direction not because they were calculating against institutional access but because their organic position and political commitments naturally produced directness, contemporaneity, and explicit socialist consciousness. Their expression of human consciousness was different in both form and substance — more direct, more immediate, more explicitly socialist and anti-imperial. The establishment can situate Morrison into the canon far more readily than it can tolerate the direct, socialist, contemporaneous anti-empire fiction of the Big Bang. And it can do this despite Morrison’s radical critical moments, inside and outside her novels — some of which are explored below.

But first it should be pointed out that the top American literary award in literature, the Pulitzer Prize, is deeply racist and classist, imperialist, to the present moment. How so? The blatant statistics.

The Pulitzer Prize record since 1980 (and beyond) shows a clear-cut and severe racist pattern in what kinds of novels get rewarded. White writers have been consistently rewarded for both historical and contemporaneous work: Updike’s suburban Pennsylvania, Ford’s New Jersey, Russo’s Maine mill town, Strout’s coastal Maine, Egan’s music industry, Kingsolver’s Appalachia are all contemporary American life dramatized in the present tense and all received the prize. Writers of color have been rewarded almost exclusively for historical work: Morrison’s post-Civil War, Walker’s 1930s Georgia, Whitehead’s antebellum South and 1960s Florida, Erdrich’s 1950s reservation, Everett’s antebellum South, Nguyen’s 1975 Vietnam. The pattern is nearly absolute — with the partial exception of Lahiri’s depoliticized immigrant stories and Díaz’s partly contemporary sections.

The implication is pointed and damning. The prize culture has decided, structurally if not consciously, that white writers can be trusted to dramatize and discourse on contemporary American life without producing dangerous political content, because white writers narrating contemporary American life overwhelmingly produce the depoliticized private domestic civic establishment novel that poses no structural challenge to the imperial system. Writers of color dramatizing their contemporary experience cannot be relied upon to produce the same depoliticized result, because their contemporary experience is more connected to the system’s ongoing criminal acts against them, and showing it honestly from inside that experience tends to produce the kind of explicit structural critique and condemnation that the prize culture is institutionally committed to keeping out, to keeping suppressed. So the prize routes writers of color toward their historical experience, where the damage can be acknowledged, mourned, contained, and aestheticized as past tragedy, at an unthreatening distance, rather than be shown as present crime.

This is racism operating not through individual prejudice — except when it is — but through institutional pattern, the prize culture systematically telling writers of color that their history is now admissible while their present remains too politically dangerous to reveal by reward. The contemporaneous experience of ongoing Black, Native American, Latino/a, Asian American, and all other dispossession, shown in real time from inside the community experiencing it — the civic dispossessed tradition at its most vital and most threatening — is the most consistently unrewarded tendency in the entire prize record since 1980 (and beyond). That’s not coincidence. That’s erasure. That’s the prize culture as canonical brainwashing, blinkering, and lobotomizing, doing what it has always done, admitting some criminal damage of the past while protecting the criminal nature of the present, wittingly or otherwise.

The Pulitzer Prize is also classist and imperial to the present moment. The classism operates differently but is equally structural. The prize record does reward working class and poor subjects with some regularity: Kennedy’s homeless Albany alcoholic, Proulx’s Newfoundland fishermen, Russo’s mill town workers, Kingsolver’s Appalachian poor, Morrison’s enslaved women, Walker’s rural Georgia poor. The working class is not invisible in the prize record. But the working class subjects that win are overwhelmingly shown through one of three class-protective operations.

First: historical displacement. The working class and dispossessed subjects most consistently rewarded are set safely in the past — slavery, Jim Crow, the Depression, the Civil War aftermath — where the damage can be acknowledged mainly without implicating and condemning the present system that continues to produce it. Historical displacement allows for a vitiating lack of full human consciousness of, by, and about contemporary social reality.

Second: the sympathetically observational position. The white working class novels that win — Russo, Proulx, Kennedy, Kingsolver — are written by authors who show working class experience with civic seriousness but from a position that is not organically inside the experience of ongoing dispossession. The damage is observed, felt, and well-crafted, but the system producing it is not manifested as criminal in the explicit structural way that the organic position demands and often inherently produces. The sympathetically observational position especially when written without explicit anti-hegemonic consciousness and reality shows a lack of full human consciousness, on the part of the author and the narration.

Third: depoliticization through form. When working class or poor subjects, or those otherwise assaulted by empire, appear in contemporaneous prize-winning novels they are shown through psychological interiority, individual survival, and personal resilience rather than through a more thorough manifestation of the dominating public elements and the imperial society producing the conditions. The poverty is humanized without the system being much explored and exposed explicitly. The individual suffers without the collective structures and mechanisms being overtly or fully revealed. Thus a privatized, interiorized, depoliticized form makes for a lack of human consciousness and a void of contemporary social reality.

Many novels are stupider than their authors, and you can feel it. Some authors have a much greater consciousness and social and political awareness than they express in their novels. None of the Big Bang novelists were like that. They found a way to express their cutting edge full human consciousness through story, and they were all penalized for doing so, either immediately or ultimately by the multifaceted crackdown on the so-called “radical” culture of liberatory movements and human expression.

Since 1980 or at any point in its history, what the prize record has never rewarded is the explicit, contemporaneous, structural exposure of capitalism and imperialism as the criminal system producing working class dispossession, disfigurement, and death, dramatized from inside that dispossession in real time by a writer organically inside the material. That is exactly what Gold’s Jews Without Money, Smedley’s Daughter of Earth, McKay’s Banjo, and the rest of the Big Bang tradition produced in 1929 and 1930. And it is what the prize culture has systematically excluded for a century — not working class subjects, not poor characters, not historical damage, but the living political consciousness of the organically dispossessed writer exposing and explaining the present system as criminal and demanding its transformation. The surveillance state, the war machine, and the expanding reach of imperial capitalism make dispossession an increasingly broad condition — we are all made increasingly expendable by the same systems the prize culture protects, systems now driving terminal climate collapse and maintaining nuclear arsenals capable of ending human civilization — which makes the prize culture’s continued suppression of the engaged dispossessed tradition not only a literary scandal but a civic one. The Pulitzer givers should come to grips with the continuous systematic racism and classism and imperialism their record documents.

The prize culture will give you the working class as subject. It will not give you the working class as the source of structural condemnation and expansive interrogation, let alone socialist engagement, especially not primarily. It will give you depoliticized poor, not engaged socialistic poor or anti-empire revolutionary sensibility and view, especially not wholistically. It will scarcely give you that at any class level. It will give you poverty expressed with feeling. It will not give you contemporary bigoted capitalism explicitly exposed as the crime and plutocrat empire detailed as thoroughgoing criminal perpetrator. It will gut your consciousness and comprehension of society and reality. It will give you individual survival against the odds. It will not give you collective political consciousness demanding the end of the odds, let alone revolutionary collective consciousness and approach. The half-literature full of half-persons in half-societies, drawn with craft and feeling and formal achievement, gutted of the sweeping public dimension that would make it fully human and fully threatening — this is what the Pulitzer Prize has rewarded for a century, this is what the canon blocks and destroys, and this is what it will continue to reward and produce until the criminal suppression is named for what it is and put an end to, replaced by full liberatory human consciousness and full social and political perception and institutions, the people’s liberatory constructions.

Toni Morrison was a sharp critic of the establishment American literary canon in her central argument that the canonical American literary tradition — Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Hemingway, Cather — was shaped at its deepest formal and imaginative level by the presence of Africanism, her term for the construction of Blackness as a shaping other-force against which white American identity and white American literary consciousness defined itself. The Africanist presence is not incidental or marginal to the canonical tradition, it is foundational. White empire’s silencing of Blacks shaped and disfigured the white voice and literature. The slavery and terrorism and persecution against Blacks defined white culture, white literature. And it gave the notion of American freedom its extremely perverse meaning.

Morrison’s hardest hitting conclusions are that the canonical tradition didn’t just ignore Black experience, it used Black experience and its perception of Black experience as its imaginative raw material while silencing the Black voice from the inside and then called the resulting literature universal. The universality was always a lie. The tradition was always racialized, and racist, at its core. The white American writer’s imagination was never free of the enslaved people it denied freedom to and distorted and abused and killed. Some depraved and depraving force needs to be condemned in American history and contemporary society, in culture and literature, in psychology and politics, and I think we know what that deranged long-standing force is — white empire, bigoted plutocracy.

Morrison diagnoses what the suppression did to the canonical tradition, how it deformed and limited and racialized the white literary imagination. She does not go on to make an argument about the suppressed tradition’s own achievement and superiority. Instead, she shows what the canonical tradition couldn’t see because of what it suppressed. In my argument, I show what the suppressed tradition saw that the canonical tradition could not or would not see and know and own. Morrison’s argument and mine are complementary, as far as I can tell, and together I think they create a more complete evaluation of the literary establishment. Looping back to Louise Erdrich and Native American literature in light of Toni Morrison’s argument, consider what might be called the Native Americanist presence in American literature. Leslie Marmon Silko’s terrific essay collection Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit does similar work as Playing in the Dark. The canonical tradition was deformed by what it suppressed, and what it suppressed — in part all along and especially in the Big Bang and related novels — was the greater literature. Silko’s Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit is another wonderful and inspiring, vital and absolutely foundational text of American literature.

I’m beginning to think that I obsessively sought out and devoured so many of these works twenty and thirty years ago in my twenties and thirties so that I could write today this book-length critical manifesto and act of literary and cultural recovery. It’s also part personal essay, and, if you think about it, novel. I feel I’m constantly veering off novelistically though not fictitiously into flights of consciousness and manifestations of society and culture that complement what is otherwise put forth here as literary criticism, critical manifesto, essay, and various types of research with some scholarship. Similarly I’m also beginning to feel that this exploration of the American literary Big Bang in the novel is the reason I both lived and worked, whether briefly or at great length in a wide variety of places across the country — in Native America, the deep South, the West, the Mexican border, and Appalachia — and in sometimes very rural locations and sometimes wholly urban, center city and neighborhoods. If you want to read chronologically straight through a book’s worth of illuminating and powerful direct excerpts from many of these liberatory novelists and critics that I touch on or consider at length here, in addition to many others, you can do so at the ever-growing compilation I maintain at Political Literary Criticism.

Something else that maybe should be explicitly emphasized here more than I probably have is how compelling, engaging, and enjoyable these reads are. The greatest novels and essay collections and biographies and poetry and so on of the liberatory suppressed tradition — whether socialist or anti-empire or otherwise “radical” or insurgent — are not only of higher literary quality than the establishment canonical works but are far more inviting, far more “readable,” and of far more moving quality. Why is that? Presumably because they are far more fully human, in crucial ways, and in a way that seems to infuse the overall general quality of the works.

In reading the dispossessed suppressed novels of the Big Bang and its extension and precursors not only can you can recover a lot of the “black presence” whose enforced absence Morrison identified as shaping white literature, you can recover much of all the other suppressed presences of the dispossessed peoples, so-called white peoples included. You can recover some of the full human literary achievement of the people’s tendency and tradition in literature and life that the canonical world buried all together and simultaneously — Black, Native American, working class Jewish, radical feminist, anti-imperial, and more. The Big Bang was the concentrated moment when so many of the people’s tradition produced great works, unprecedented, in thirteen months before the system killed and buried them together in a mass grave. The people’s literary efflorescence in the novel and in other arts and modes of expression and communication and culture during the socialist era in America was an amazing phenomenon that once you know of it remains as entirely engaging and inspiring today as it must have been in the original moment — possibly more so, given the effect of the long perspective and intense weight of history.

I’m not aware that anyone, any novelists or critics, any scholars or advocates for literature have made this particular argument of the Big Bang in the American novel with its many implications and correlations, resulting in both constructive and violent reactions. Some of the accounts that come closest — Paul Lauter’s Reconstructing American Literature, the Heath Anthology project, Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front — are complementary and expansive of this argument and project. Michael Denning’s work and Barbara Foley’s Radical Representations, and many other scholarly studies, have provided good bibliographic help over the decades but mostly I discovered texts by going from one source to another that themselves examined or referred to one source or another, especially the criticism of the diverse anti-imperial Old Left and its adjacent works of the first five decades of the twentieth century, and somewhat thereafter.

Lauter and the Heath Anthology broadened the canon to include more diverse voices, though it gets framed primarily as an inclusion argument — more voices deserve a place alongside the canonical tradition. I argue that the suppressed tradition that occurred in the Big Bang is greater literature in every way and that the canonical tradition was built on its burial. The suppressed works’ partial inclusion alongside the canon doesn’t clarify the reality, doesn’t condemn the supremacist capitalist canon, which should be changed, corrected. The canon perpetuates the false hierarchy and leads to continued gutted and distorted results in literature, consciousness, and politics. A lot of the great books are not so great, and they actively serve as cover for greater books, purposefully marginalized or disappeared from history. The supremacist, imperialist canon leads to ignorant and mistaken literary conversations about aesthetics and norms, art and culture, individuality and society, politics and the nature of reality and possibility — everything.

Morrison’s Playing in the Dark argues vitally that the canonical tradition was shaped by what it needed to suppress, that the Africanist presence is a yawning absence of canonical American literature. True enough and there’s a whole genocidal absence of many peoples of America that runs through the canon. It’s also true that there are greater works than those that have been canonized, including works going back a century and more from the dispossessed peoples who did not completely get genocided away, and from people of all ethnicities and cultures who did not get completely crushed by bigoted state-capitalism and the conquering forces of empire.

Denning’s The Cultural Front may be the closest text to what I’m doing here. It’s a refreshing serious historical account of the Popular Front cultural moment, the proletarian literary tradition, the organized left cultural infrastructure of the 1930s. He takes the material seriously as culture rather than sociology. But Denning is ultimately a cultural historian rather than a literary critic making fundamental judgments about art and aesthetics, the literary. He doesn’t say the suppressed tradition produced the greater literature. He documents that it existed and mattered historically.

Alan Wald’s trilogy — Exiles from a Future Time (2002), Trinity of Passion (2007), American Night (2012) — does good recovery scholarship on individual writers but is academic and specialist in reach and makes no argument about any sense of a Big Bang or concentrated literary achievement that dwarfs the canonical tradition. Also, Wald’s focus is on the “Literary Left” from 1930 through being “supplanted by a ‘New Left’ cultural upheaval in the 1960s” by which time the Old Left was totally crushed and the vacuum was filled by the compatible left, the fake socialist left, that Rockhill exposes. By beginning a history of the “Literary Left” at 1930, Wald misses the literary Big Bang of 1929, and its brilliant eve of 1928, and the bulk of the Harlem Renaissance throughout the twenties, without which the great left explosion of the Big Bang would have been very much diminished. More like a Little Blip than a Big Bang. Also missed in such an account is Red Summer of 1919 that instantly produced the profound anti-imperialist poetry of Claude McKay and had strong influence on literature otherwise thereafter.

Cary Nelson’s great Repression and Recovery, which I came to late, toward the end of writing this whole thing, makes the suppression argument most directly for poetry — that the radical poetry of the 1910s through 1930s was deliberately buried and that the recovery changes everything. That’s structurally identical to my argument but it’s about poetry not the novel and it doesn’t have the Big Bang’s concentrated thirteen month moment to anchor the claim.

Barbara Foley’s work on the proletarian novel is a gold mine, in particular, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941 (1993), which is highly readable though rigorous and serious as academic work. Look though at the both vital though unfortunate start date, 1929, nearly the same as Wald’s “Left Literary” study nine years later that barely catches the Big Bang and cleaves it from the full decade of antiwar, postwar, and Harlem Renaissance that would be so crucial and in many ways formative for everything that would follow. Radical Representations was published in the Duke University Press series co-edited by Frederic Jameson, who like McGurl seemingly should have known and accounted far better for what they were gutting from their accounts and elaborations and criticism of postwar American fiction and the MFA program era.

Barbara Foley was denied tenure at Northwestern University in 1989, politically motivated, as an openly Old Left Marxist scholar and activist:

She was denied tenure by the Provost at Northwestern University on the grounds of “grave professional misconduct”—stemming from her participation in a 1985 campus demonstration against Adolfo Calero, a Nicaraguan contra leader—even though she had been approved for tenure by her department, the A&P Committee, and the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Foley secured a tenured position at Rutgers University-Newark where she remained for the rest of her career. But here we see once again the vicious perpetual suppression machinations of Empire. Sometimes hard truths need to be said as blatant and as naked as the situation is and requires. This isn’t church. This isn’t class. Much of American consciousness is perverted as a result of the country’s perpetual imperialism and bigoted tyrannical tendencies and punishing and lethal institutions. America is an outlaw country, through and through. It also has some strong liberatory traditions and needs to lean into as many of those as it possibly can, as quickly as it can. Meanwhile American consciousness grows increasingly progressive populist and liberatory socialist in its most vital social movements — a progression that the institutionalized recovery of the Big Bang in the novel, and in related arts and literature, can help with. It’s as plain and simple and clear as can be — this isn’t the proverbial rocket science — and it can be detailed with as much complexity and scope as you like.

So Foley’s tenure denial is part of the suppression pattern, the most serious academic scholar of the proletarian novel tradition at the time denied tenure at a prestigious institution in the same Cold War and post-Cold War climate that buried the tradition she was studying. It’s novelistic, isn’t it? Revelatory of larger consciousness of people and society. The scholarship that most directly challenged the canonical hierarchy faced institutional resistance even in the supposedly open academic workplace. If Foley had been a prominent establishment business professor protesting American support of the terrorist contras, she would have been much harder or impossible to kick out of the university. The suppression much more freely attacks the marginalized critics of the suppression as with the writers originally suppressed.

When reflecting later on the incident, Foley said: “What did I learn from all this? That radical faculty, if they act on their beliefs, have no real protection. But that it is important to act on one’s beliefs.”

And thus the Trump suppression today.

In any event, none of these scholarly works makes my argument because none of them combines all four elements simultaneously — the specific concentrated thirteen month Big Bang moment, the normative and aesthetic claim that the suppressed tradition is the greater literature, the full political and institutional critique and condemnation of the suppression, and the forward-looking claim about what restoring the Big Bang to its central place would mean for living writers and the future of American literature and culture, society and politics, and the quality, scope, and depth of human consciousness. None seem to notice any Big Bang in the novel, as thirteen month concentration or otherwise, let alone analyze it. Each of them does one or two of these things. I do all four together, and I do it from outside the institutional framework that applies pressure to constrain every one of them. Not that it is all good being entirely outside establishment institutions, because the institutions can sometimes in very significant part provide some space and resources and connections, financial and cultural, professional and otherwise to support liberatory artists and academics and the work they are able to create despite the many hostilities and hurdles they face inside those institutions.

My own three-year MFA experience was — for me personally, not for everyone at all times — as invaluable as it was frustrating. It was great in many ways, despite very severe and agonizing limitations. It was one of the highlights of my life, and I knew it at the time, as well as one of the most frustrating of times because I wanted a socialist literary salon, and that is absolutely not what is institutionalized in America. That is absolutely not what the MFA establishment is about. Regardless, I have fond recollections of the creative writing teachers, who could not have been generally more professional and encouraging in the endeavor of literary understanding and creation, the core teachers especially, as with the more scholarly professors — despite the fact that I could so often not reconcile my views and interests with a number of their particular understandings or pre-occupations. In basic professional terms I sometimes could, but where it so often felt that things mattered most, I could not.

Cary Nelson’s indispensable book on poetry — Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory 1910 to 1945 — was published in 1989, the year after I entered college at Penn State and five years before I started the new MFA program at Southwest Texas State University. (SWT was the only MFA school I was accepted into out of six applications, aside from Oregon State, to which I was referred by sister program faculty at the University of Oregon. Offered no first-year teaching assistantship at Oregon State unlike at SWT (now Texas State University), it was an easy decline and so I went to Texas.) Cary Nelson’s book, which I explored in depth only very recently, is a treasure and delight to read, with exceptional graphics. What I really needed back in the day was its fiction version, or this book on the Big Bang. I wish I had come across Repression and Recovery, picked it up, and comprehended it immediately upon its publication — rather than first reading it this past year when I was already neck deep in this book. I assume that when I initially stumbled over it, probably decades ago, I bypassed it because my intense focus was on fiction, the novel in particular. In my view, Nelson’s position on poetry and culture should replace T.S. Eliot’s influence wholesale. What a miraculous transformation that would be for the MFA programs — where literature could once again become a site of leading art, culture, and consciousness, rather than lagging and too often wounding art, culture, and consciousness.

I try to fill these voids in fiction, the novel in particular, from a position outside the academy, on Substack, in the polemical and free-ranging way of the people’s liberatory tradition rather than in the scholarly prose of the institutions that helped bury it. That said, these left liberatory scholars are very lively writers in their great academic works.

Though the strongest most direct evidence for my argument is in the novels themselves that anyone can read and see, where the dramatic and critical frameworks are coherent and powerful, any argument for these works, this tradition, this understanding, faces structural obstacles that have nothing to do with its quality. Unless there is some revolutionary break, or modest opening, the establishment literary world will ignore or dismiss it. That’s the suppression pattern repeating itself in real time, which this essay both predicts and documents.

Much of academia would likely find this argument insufficiently theoretical, too polemical, lacking much scholarly footnotes and secondary literature engagement, though it engages Old Left socialist literary criticism that is virtually ignored by everyone. The institutional reflex is to protect itself by its own terms of admission, its arbitrary and false strictures, its inverted canon and empty rationales.

The Substack literary world is likely to mostly encounter this argument as too long, too political, too uncompromising. The audience size for a book-length essay on the suppression of the American “radical” and socialist literary tradition as the suppression of the greatest American literature and culture is probably not massive.

The main bridge to others, if there is one here, is the novels themselves. Readers who encounter this argument and then read Gold or Smedley or McKay should not need to be persuaded further. The novels do the work. This essay’s job is to get people to the novels, and to get them there in a context that has at least partly unwarped the cultural framing that conditions them to see up as down and down as up in many ways, to various degrees.

Time and timing is a perennial issue. Arguments that matter most are often not received well immediately — especially given existing conditions. Parrington was buried. Calverton was buried. I document the pattern here. Most people will probably not react well to it immediately. Far more people will never read it. That doesn’t matter in the long run as much as whether the argument is true and whether the novels and the tradition are as great, as vital, as valuable, as I claim.

Being outside the institutional channels that could help validate this argument is also being outside the institutional channels that would contain it. On Substack this essay can find the readers it needs without requiring the establishment’s permission to even exist in the first place.

McGurl claims that after the Victorian age, the novel transforms into modernism and moves as he discusses in his three books from the art novel to the MFA novel to the Amazon novel. He sees the three phases as a more or less natural institutional evolution of how fiction gets produced and circulated, not as successive ideological operations serving specific class interests. But it would be more accurate to state that the novel as a form moves through three successive institutional captures — first by the aesthetic ideology of the art novel that elevated it into a prestige object serving propertied taste, then by the MFA system that industrialized that prestige and produced it at scale, then by Amazon that commodified the whole operation and reduced every novel to a consumer product in a genre category competing for algorithmic visibility. In a counterintuitive way, rather than expanding the fundamental potential of the novel, each capture narrows what the novel can do and who it can reach, because the novel that escapes all three captures simultaneously — that refuses the art novel’s aesthetic ideology, refuses the MFA’s house style and political timidity, and refuses Amazon’s genre categorization and customer satisfaction logic — is the novel that does what the Big Bang six did — written from inside the engaged dispossessed position, organically generated from the material it’s expressing, formally serious without being formally self-conscious, politically explicit, anti-imperial, contemporary, collectively conscious without sacrificing individual interiority. Such a novel had been made a historical and contemporary non-entity — in the MFA, in publishing, in Amazon, in the prize culture, in canonical consciousness.

The novel that means anything now is the one the establishment has spent a century making impossible to think, impossible to publish, and invisible when published anyway. The three successive captures each show what the novel needs to escape. The Amazon novel is the art novel’s logical conclusion — aesthetic interior individual prestige fully dissolved into commodity. The counter to all three captures is the liberatory organic dispossessed position, the fully human consciousness, the world seen fully, explicitly and contemporaneously for what it is from the point of view of the liberatory dispossessed vantage, the farthest seeing point of view, as opposed to the ideologically blinkered purview of the imperial establishment.

McGurl doesn’t frame the three phases as capture at all. For McGurl the art novel represents a genuine achievement — the elevation of fiction to a serious art form — not a capture by propertied taste. The MFA system represents a democratization of access to literary production — more people from more backgrounds getting to become writers — not the industrialization of a prestige ideology. Amazon represents a further democratization and diversification of readership and genre — not the final commodification of everything the previous two phases produced.

McGurl is essentially optimistic about all three phases in his own terms. The art novel gave fiction prestige and seriousness. The MFA gave that prestige wider access. Amazon gave fiction wider distribution. Each phase expands something in his account. The “system-wide rise in excellence” language in his writing is not ironic — he means it. He thinks American fiction has genuinely gotten better across this period. And within establishment, imperial bounds, it apparently has. Which is why there is so much criticism of it, and dissatisfaction with it, right?

What McGurl can’t see — because of the structuring omission — is that each phase also progressively narrowed the ideological range of what serious fiction could do and who it could speak for and from. The democratization of access to the MFA is real but it democratized access to a form already gutted of its most politically serious possibilities. Amazon’s democratization of distribution is real but it distributes within a literary culture already shaped by the previous two captures. McGurl sees the expansion without seeing what was foreclosed to make the expansion permissible to empire.

If you look from outside the establishment, from the position of what was suppressed rather than what was elevated, you see American fiction as imperial capture, not democratic excellence. Quite the opposite.

McGurl spent twenty years and three books describing the machinery of a literary culture that buried the greatest American literature, from inside that culture, with complete sincerity, calling it a rise in excellence. The intellectual effort required to see what he can’t see, to hold a people’s dispossessed liberatory framework against his institutional authority, to keep insisting that the emperor has no clothes while the emperor’s tailors write for the New York Review of Books could be exhausting if it weren’t invigorating. But it can be a real headache to think clearly against a culture organized to prevent it.

Most people who sense something is wrong with the canonical account don’t have the historical knowledge, the critical vocabulary, or the sustained energy to work through what McGurl’s three books represent and why they’re inadequate. This essay and the larger project does the work so the reader doesn’t have to do it alone. It provides the framework that makes McGurl’s limitations visible and understandable. In the three books, McGurl is basically summarizing conventional wisdom about American literature.

That may be a damning way to put it, but I think it’s fair. It has been discussed for more than a century that the art novel did not exist until high modernism made it so. Many have dwelt on the MFA system’s longstanding and sweeping impact on American literature, and many have lamented or celebrated the expanding commercialization of contemporary fiction. The art novel as the elevation of fiction to serious literature, the MFA as the institutional infrastructure of postwar literary culture, Amazon as the new marketplace disrupting that infrastructure — literary historians and cultural critics had been making versions of all three arguments that McGurl stitches together by way of his MFA era literary diagram, his three book, three-phase sequence, and some “lower-middle-class modernism” jargon that gives conventional wisdom the appearance of original analysis. But lower-middle-class modernism is just another name for working class or middle-class realism, basically, which is redundant since even the low income working class in America has been conned into considering themselves middle class, as McGurl himself notes. Much of this so-called modernism is simply realism. And a lot of it is not only lower middle class, it’s also plain old middle class, and entitled class. McGurl creates an authoritative summary of conventional wisdom with little originality. Which is okay. It takes scholarly work to summarize sweeping fields.

But confining the people’s dispossessed liberatory fiction to little more than a subordinate clause over three books is wildly limiting too. If McGurl were doing genuinely original historical and institutional analysis of American fiction he would have had to confront and explain this dispossessed liberatory tendency throughout American history, because a genuinely original analysis follows the evidence rather than conventional wisdom. The fact that McGurl can reproduce the conventional wisdom’s structuring omission so effortlessly — in one subordinate clause, without apparent discomfort — shows that he’s working from within that wisdom rather than against it. Original scholarship disturbs. McGurl’s three books were absorbed by the establishment almost immediately because they confirmed rather than challenged what the establishment already believed about itself.

McGurl is a sophisticated summarizer of conventional wisdom, which is a significant intellectual achievement, but it’s not the same as original critical thought. Parrington was original. Calverton was original. The literary Big Bang theory in the American novel is original. McGurl is authoritative. A different thing.

Take again “lower-middle-class modernism.” It sounds precise and analytical but it’s essentially a relabeling of working class and middle class realism with a modernist qualifier that flatters the conventional tradition by associating it with high literary prestige. The “modernism” in the label does ideological work that connects Carver to Joyce and Faulkner, elevating the workshop tradition by association while obscuring that what’s actually being described is just realist fiction about ordinary American life, which is not a new form and not a new subject and not particularly modernist in any meaningful sense. Carver is not doing what Joyce is doing. The label inflates by association.

And the class nomenclature isn’t all that sharp anyway. The American working class has been systematically convinced to identify as middle class, which means “lower-middle-class” as a category is itself ideologically loaded before McGurl even applies it to fiction. It naturalizes the class misidentification rather than interrogating it, though he does probe it a bit in The Program Era. If he had probed it deeper — what discoveries await! A genuinely original class analysis of the MFA novel would ask why American working class fiction is produced and received within a framework that can’t name the working class as more fully part of what they are — the dispossessed class. That’s a question that the Big Bang tradition answers directly and which McGurl’s “lower-middle-class modernism” label is designed, perhaps unconsciously, to avoid asking, possibly because it moves too close to the Popular Front tradition that he slates dismissively to a subordinate clause in The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James. McGurl entirely missed the greatest elevations in American fiction after Henry James. He entirely missed the Big Bang in the American novel, along with its extensions and precursors.

The “lower-middle-class modernism” label is conventional wisdom in false dress. It’s authoritative sounding, institutionally flattering, analytically inert. It shows the establishment’s seemingly infinite capacity to appear to engage with class while systematically avoiding the deep class and imperial analysis that would be most revealing, most threatening, and most useful to explore in American literature. Most accurate and most needed.

The fact of the matter is that the dominant MFA aesthetic, when fully internalized, is not just aesthetically inferior to the Big Bang tradition. It is actively harmful. It fails to tell the truth about American life, and it trains readers to mistake omission for depth, evasion for complexity, political lobotomy for cultural and intellectual sophistication. The canonical aesthetic displaces the people’s liberatory literature and damages the capacity to receive, embrace, and internalize it. That’s what happens to a reader whose literary conscience, consciousness, and expectation is formed primarily by James and Hemingway and Carver, or the postmoderns and the like, and who then encounters Gold or Smedley or McKay and others in the liberatory dispossessed tradition of the people’s novel. The encounter can feel wrong, crude, too direct, insufficiently literary, because the training has inverted aesthetic and normative hierarchies so completely that the greater literature can come across as lesser. The dominant MFA aesthetic produces readers less capable of recognizing what full human consciousness in fiction and all life looks and feels like — let alone writers capable of producing it. Though the encounter with the suppressed tradition, when it finally comes, can teach by negative example — the evasion and gutting suddenly visible as evasion and gutting, the half suddenly felt as half, when the whole appears alongside it.

It’s honest not cruel to point out that the suppression has buried books and damaged the people who were denied them, changed what they can perceive and value, implicated them in their own literary impoverishment without knowing it. The imperial ideology distorts individual human conscience and consciousness, cultural knowledge and social understanding. It does so most completely when it feels like taste, like sophistication, like the natural sense of what good literature is. That’s the suppression’s most complete operation. Understanding it is the first step toward undoing it.

I state versions of this basic point repeatedly throughout this essay using the lobotomy metaphor, the language of brainwashing and zombification, and by an argument of half-persons and half-literature, of which there is more soon to be said. Reader accountability and critical reading is key. And writers have their own responsibilities.

The suppression has cost literature and consciousness. The implications are personal and institutional, cultural and societal. If you’re trying to engage with the American literary canon, you need to know what the imperial establishment training has done to your perception. You need to know how it has happened to you. You need to consider what it feels like to encounter Gold or Smedley after a lifetime of the canonical tradition. You need to know why the encounter might feel wrong and abrasive rather than engaging and enlivening.

You need to understand the suppression and why it can make things feel the way they should not. You need to see the headache and heartlessness and gutlessness of establishment literature for what it is.

The literal subordinate clause — the grammatical structure in which an acknowledgment is embedded in a dependent clause before the main argument proceeds as if the acknowledgment hadn’t been made — is what McGurl includes in the introduction to The Novel Art. He acknowledges the exclusion of left fiction in a metaphorical subordinate clause of the introduction and book and proceeds with the imperial Jamesian establishment framework anyway, from that book and moving forward into his next book The Program Era. That’s the literal instance of the conceptual framework that applies metaphorically throughout his studies of American fiction.

The metaphorical subordinate clause — the way the canonical tradition and its critical apparatus sometimes embed acknowledgment of what it’s excluding in a grammatically or rhetorically dependent position before proceeding as if the acknowledgment changes nothing — fits a recurrent broad pattern of suppression, sometimes unwitting, often not. It’s a structural pattern, an ideology.

Trilling attacked Parrington while acknowledging Parrington’s achievement, thereby reducing a socialist view of literature to a subordinate clause — literally subordinate — to scholarship and ostensible universal understanding. The New Critics acknowledged that social context exists while declaring it methodologically off-limits — subordinate clause. The prize culture awards individual writers from the dispossessed tradition while continuing to marginalize the tradition as a whole — subordinate clause. The multicultural turn embraced ethnic and identity dimensions of the dispossessed tradition while filtering out much explicit contemporary class politics and anti-imperial consciousness — subordinate clause. McGurl acknowledging left literature’s exclusion while building a framework that makes the dispossessed liberatory tradition structurally invisible — subordinate clause.

Each instance follows the same grammatical logic as the literal subordinate clause. The acknowledgment is placed in a dependent position, the main clause proceeds as if the acknowledgment were merely a qualification rather than a fundamental challenge to the argument’s premises. The subordinate clause as metaphor names this as a recurring structural technique of the canonical machinery rather than as a series of individual intellectual failures or oversights. It shows the canonical tradition as a system that has developed both blunt and sophisticated mechanisms for acknowledging or accounting for what it excludes while continuing the exclusion. This is an intellectual gambit in guise of qualification more insidious than simple suppression because it incorporates the critique into the structure of the argument that continues past it. It doesn’t just ignore a potential counterargument, it presumes to explain it away “up front.”

The metaphorical subordinate clause is a structural operation, the canonical two-step of accounting for the socially engaged dispossessed tradition, placing it in a marginal dependent position before proceeding with the main argument as if the acknowledgment were merely a qualification. The pattern appears everywhere that total disappearance is not the tactic — in McGurl and in Trilling and in the prize culture and in the multicultural containments and in the MFA system’s determined fake political neutrality.

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What Kind of Critical Project Is This?

What kind of critical project isn’t this?

For one thing, this project — or book-length essay — is a critical polemic, something in the tradition of Orwell’s essays, Edmund Wilson’s cultural criticism, or Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark — critiques among many others that I immersed myself in decades ago, mainly, as I detailed a bit in Texas MFA and excerpt a long list at “Political Literary Criticism of Art and Social Change.” Here I make an argument with openly declared political commitment. I’m not interested in the pretense of culturally critical neutrality that the academy often demands. I have an MFA in Creative Writing, not a PhD in tortured scholarship, though I’ve often referred to plenty of good scholarship through the years that is absolutely vital to this project, and I keep much of it close at hand. I’m surrounded by novels, literary criticism and literary history, biographies and memoirs, and social and political analyses. Every once in a while piles of books will collapse, especially when I try to pull a book from the bottom of a stack in the midst of a series of columns. I have plenty of homemade bookshelves, but they are long since overflowed even with my wife throwing books out that she claims have deteriorated. I recently saved a short work by Victor Hugo from the recycling bin, near tragedy averted.

Beyond critical polemic, this essay does all kinds of things, as a hybrid extended critical essay of cultural intervention, including several things that don’t fit neatly into any single category. It’s literary criticism, art criticism, in its aesthetic and normative judgments and in considering how specific novels work or don’t work and what they achieve or don’t.

It’s cultural history and sociology in that it documents and examines the social mechanisms of violent suppression and ideological replication — the Red Scares, HUAC, COINTELPRO, the prize culture, the MFA system, the Armed Services Editions, the New Criticism’s and other formalism’s institutionalization in universities. I focus on a century and more of American literary, cultural, and political life. The connections drawn from Henry James to T.S. Eliot to the New Critics to Lionel Trilling to Leon Wieseltier … and from Malcolm Cowley to William Faulkner’s Nobel, from Maxwell Perkins’s genealogy back to the founding fathers, with Roy Cohn from the McCarthy hearings to being Donald Trump’s mentor, and beyond. These are not rhetorical flourishes and literary niceties. They are documented institutional continuities that show systemic suppression mechanisms rather than a series of happenstance or unrelated coincidences that randomly affected culture and literature. There has been precious little random and happenstance about creating one particular canon in place of its far more deserving, far more viable, far more potentially productive and constructive other canon — far more fully human and accomplished.

This essay is polemic in that it makes explicit verdicts, names perpetrators, strikes away false balance, and openly advocates for a revaluation rather than merely describing one. The essay does not pretend to be above the argument it is making. It is inside the argument, made by someone whose own work has followed something of the same institutional trajectory as the writers it reexamines and holds forth.

This project contains a bit of personal history and personal essay in that it recounts some of my specific situation and consciousness, first as a young writer from Pennsylvania arriving in Texas in the mid-1990s with a social science background and a broadly left socialist understanding of the world, encountering American and world literature in full force and being bothered by something I basically understood but did not have the holistic knowledge to entirely delineate. So this argument comes from my specific consciousness rather than from a supposedly neutral critical position. This essay’s location on Substack rather than in an academic journal or from a university press is also part of what this essay is. The publication venue shows the argument — coming from outside controlled establishment institutions as it does.

This essay is also a critical manifesto in the sections that move from analysis to exhortation, in urging for what needs to be built, what the people’s tradition in its liberatory tendency demands, what the future of American literature requires. The most similar works in American criticism may be those of the Big Bang era socialist literary critics and their comprehensive revaluations of American literary history from explicitly political and populist positions: V.L. Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought, the influential progressive literary history that the New Critics attacked and buried because it showed class interest as the shaping force of American literature; V.F. Calverton’s The Liberation of American Literature, the socialist literary history making a structural argument also about how class interest shaped canon creation, itself now largely buried; Bernard Smith’s Forces in Literary Criticism, the socialist critical history that put T.S. Eliot’s theological conservatism and the formalist tradition into piercing political and aesthetic perspective; and decades later Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, the argument that the canonical tradition both exploited and suppressed the Black presence it depended on, made by a great novelist and highly rewarded professional whose ivy league credentials, Random House editorship, and eventual Nobel Prize gave her an institutional standing that Gold, Calverton, and Smith — publishing in the New Masses, adopting pen names, known openly as communists — never had, and that even Parrington, the establishment’s own progressive literary historian, ultimately lost when the Cold War made his socialist framework and literary history intolerable even within the academy.

In this extended critical essay as cultural intervention, I try to use the essay form the way the suppressed novels used the novel form, as a vehicle for saying directly what the establishment literary culture is structured to prevent being said. The form and the content are the same argument. That’s not a weakness or an impurity. It’s the essay doing what it says literature has every right to do and often must do — absolutely refusing to falsely separate the aesthetic from the political, the personal from the structural, the individual voice from the collective condition it speaks from and for. The suppressed writers couldn’t separate their formal choices from their political content because they were inside the material. Smedley wrote from inside her own revolutionary consciousness. Gold wrote from inside the Lower East Side poverty he grew up in. McKay wrote from inside the diasporic community he actually lived among in Marseille. The suppressed tradition was buried because it was an act of resistance and liberation both, consciously or not on the writers’ part, consciously enough on the establishment’s. The people’s liberatory literature of the suppressed tradition used its own content and its own principles to find its own form.

This essay happens to be in that condition and tradition, that historical tendency in literature. It’s written from inside the suppression it documents, since my own work has followed the same institutional trajectory as the writers it recovers, published outside the institutional channels it exposes, on Substack because there’s nowhere else it can readily go. The existence of this book-length liberatory critical project here on Substack is part of the argument. This extended critical essay refuses academic neutrality, refuses false balance to assuage the establishment, refuses to separate political commitment from aesthetic judgment, and so must be published outside the institutional structure it critiques. It happens to enact what I argue the novel must often do and does, typically against long odds.

So the form is the content in the sense that the essay doesn’t just argue that the suppressed tradition declined to separate the aesthetic from the political, this essay too resists that separation. This essay doesn’t just argue that serious literary work gets pushed outside institutional channels for political reasons, this essay is pushed outside those channels for the same political reasons. This essay doesn’t just argue that the personal and the structural are inseparable, this essay is personally situated, specifically voiced, and structurally argued simultaneously.

If the essay were published in the establishment PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association of America, with proper footnotes, proper citations, proper quotations, and so on, and with the polemical edges softened for peer review, the form would contradict the content. It would be arguing for the suppressed tradition’s rejection of institutional norms while accepting those norms as the price of being heard. The Substack publication, the voice the establishment would call disrespectful,1 the explicit political commitment, the rejection of false academic neutrality, these aren’t incidental features of the essay’s presentation. They are the argument visible in the form itself.

I hope to turn American literature upside down by writing this essay. Or is it right-side up? That is, left-side up. And why not? Wasn’t me who turned it upside down in the first place.

Expletive, expletive, expletive.

This essay as book is itself an example of the novelistic approach that belongs at the center of a people’s canon, the real canon. I’m tempted to slap a meta-protagonist on top of this whole thing and call it a novel:

And then he wrote — fire streaming from his hair and blasting from his fingertips, these goddamn no-good establishment mucky-mucks pitchforking the American mind until it juices out of its battered skull and collapses in on itself — I’ll show them!!!

Maybe something calm and measured like that.

Meanwhile, this essay is novelistic in that it has protagonists, not just argued positions but human beings cast with enough biographical and psychological specificity that readers may form attachments and feel losses.

Wallace Thurman dying at thirty-two with three novels finished and infinite potential destroyed, the Harlem Renaissance losing its sharpest and most uncomfortable internal critic.

Nella Larsen driven from literature entirely by a baseless plagiarism accusation, spending her last decades as a nurse, the third novel rejected and lost.

Langston Hughes performing contrition before Senator Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn to save a career already half-destroyed, excluding his most radical work from his own Selected Poems.

Michael Gold’s formerly great readership shrinking from the New Masses to the Daily Worker, the man once compared to Walt Whitman writing for thousands rather than hundreds of thousands by the end, his critical framework declared aesthetically bankrupt by the New Critics whose anti-social vocabulary was partly constructed as a direct response to his insistence that literature served class interests. These are not merely historical data points. They are characters and realities, authors whose fates readers experience as losses of great artistic and cultural, political and psychological magnitude.

Claude McKay dying in 1948 in Chicago in poverty and neglect, three novels written in the 1930s and 1940s rejected by every publisher and not seen in print until 1990, 2017, and 2020, the man who should be recognized as the preeminent novelist of the socialist era in America and of the entire first half of the twentieth century, at least, whose pan-African internationalism and working class consciousness made him too radical for the NAACP, too racially focused for the Communist Party, too sexually frank for respectable Harlem, and too Black and too socialist for the white literary establishment, dying without institutional home or canonical recognition, the full scope of his achievement not visible until decades after his death.

Agnes Smedley — valiant, indomitable, part Joan of Arc, part revolutionary outcast — rose from the most crushing poverty and abuse to become an international revolutionary journalist and novelist, who fought alongside independence movements on three continents, who was hounded by the FBI and the US Army and died in exile in London in 1950 with her ashes sent to China because America had no place for her, a figure of such clarity and fury and revolutionary resolve that the establishment had no choice but to destroy her reputation and bury her work. The arc of her life is novelistic in the deepest sense — suffering transformed not into transcendence but into political consciousness, outrage metabolized into action, exile chosen over capitulation. She is among the essay’s most vivid protagonists — part Cherokee, working class, female, internationally revolutionary — whose novel Daughter of Earth may be the most complete single expression of the civic dispossessed tradition, though the six Big Bang novels together achieve what no single novel could accomplish alone.

Those are some of the key protagonists of this essay as novel, just as there are specific antagonists too, not abstract forces but named individuals carrying out identifiable institutional, cultural, and political functions. Maxwell Perkins, as the patrician gatekeeper whose genealogy traces directly to America’s founding fathers — or is it colonizers and conquistadors, founding enslavers — canonized three white male writers at the same publisher with the same editor, and called it literary judgment.

An imperial variety of literary critics, ranging from the aristocratic expatriates Henry James and T.S. Eliot, along with the neo-feudal Southern reactionary New Critics, helped torpedo American literary consciousness and understanding. As did the august arch-liberal professor Lionel Trilling who professed the political ideology disguised as aesthetic preference that buried V.L. Parrington’s socialist literary analysis, using the presumptuous prestige of Jamesian technical constrictions and narrow psychological fixation.

The assiduously mentally cleansing Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler changed and used the political-as-social criteria to deny the Pulitzer prize to even the tepid social satirist Sinclair Lewis for his 1920 novel Main Street during the First Red Scare, on the grounds that it wasn’t “wholesome.” Then exactly two decades later, Butler blocked any Pulitzer prize from being awarded to deny Hemingway’s selection by the advisory board for For Whom the Bell Tolls amid the political pressures surrounding American entry into World War Two and hostility to some of the novel’s Spanish Civil War politics. Butler also fired distinguished antiwar professors during the First Red Scare as longtime university president. Establishment America — what a place.

Roy Cohn — defamer, demonizer, professional destroyer of reputations — extracted political concessions from Langston Hughes before the congressional witchcraft-like trial, a professional lynching, as public hearing, the same Roy Cohn who would later become Donald Trump’s closest mentor and model — establishment racism and classism, institutionalized and in power. These are not mere rhetorical connections. These are the destructive institutional political continuities that read like a novelist’s planted irony, or nefarious coincidence, except they are real and causal to culture in terrible ways.

The professional literary smear artist Leon Wieseltier was Trilling’s direct institutional heir, serving on the figurehead pro-invasion Committee for the Liberation of Iraq during the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 while he scurrilously attacked Nicholson Baker’s anti Iraq War novel Checkpoint in an odious hatchet job as review in the New York Times. The literary cultural war police and the imperial militant state operate as the same system through different mechanisms. Wieseltier on the Orwellian Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and Wieseltier assaulting Checkpoint are not two ideologically distinct affronts to conscience, consciousness, and intellect but one and the same.2

The Big Bang They Buried is a type of novelistic title, and the extensive narrative project has novelistic scope and a plot of chronicle, investigation, and even adventure, recording a cause and effect chain of events across decades. Choices have consequences, and the results play out. There’s narrative momentum to the suppression story. The Big Bang erupts. The stock market crashes. The Red Scare assaults. The novels go out of print. The critical vocabulary that would make sense of them is systematically destroyed. The reactionary New Criticism fills the vacuum. Its sequential backstory runs through the aristocratic expatriates — Henry James, T.S. Eliot — and through the supremacist slavery and imperial Native genocide that shaped the obscurant canonical imagination they enthroned. The MFA system institutionalizes the suppressive replacement aesthetic of minimalism and individualism, mixed with chaotic maximalism, a fake political neutrality, mystery over clarity, personal craft and technique over social consciousness and analysis, style over substance. The prize culture rewards the tame or distant and private interior over the insurgent or indicting and politically public. The plot moves hard and fast to the present moment in literature as the consequence of all the preceding instinctive and purposeful choices, the accumulating and culminating result of a century of fateful and brutal attacks, willful negligence, and wholesale distortions and eviscerations. That’s plot in a powerful sense, causal events and confrontations moving toward a condition that feels both inevitable and contingent, that could have gone differently at multiple points, should have gone differently, and failed to.

The essay has drama, irony, and tragic reversal throughout. Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money going through eleven printings in 1930 alone, translated into every major language, then suppressed so completely that the critical vocabulary for understanding it was denounced as not merely worthless but actively destructive to literature and society, condemned and buried by the Cold War establishment. Wallace Thurman’s radical journal Fire!! burning through its single issue and going broke, a leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance abandoned by the financial indifference of otherwise generous funders. McKay’s posthumous novels — Romance in Marseille written in 1933, published 2020; Amiable With Big Teeth written 1941, published 2017 — sitting in archives for decades while lesser work was canonized and taught, his published novels neglected and pointedly misunderstood. All the great novels of the suppressed six wholly neglected and smeared in favor of the inferior canon.

This narrative has tragic structure in the classical sense, not pessimism but the recognition that the forces producing the catastrophe were identifiable, that the catastrophe was preventable, that specific choices made by specific people at specific moments led to specific and terrible outcomes. The Big Bang was the moment of maximum achievement and possibility whose suppression cost American literature and culture its most capacious, honest, and clarifying version of itself. The possibility was real. The destruction was deliberate. The loss is irreversible in certain ways and potentially reversible in others. The tragedy is in the loss and the process of the loss.

This discourse has a consciousness that develops across its length. It begins with a specific insight — that the greatest concentrated achievement in American literary history happened in thirteen months and was immediately and systematically suppressed — and moves outward from there, making discoveries, revealing implications, tracing causes and consequences, until it arrives at the full explanation of what was lost, why it was lost, and what must be built from the recovery. The consciousness is the argument in motion. That bildungsroman quality — a consciousness moving toward clarity — is not the canonical tradition’s version of the sensitive young man transcending his rough origins toward art and selfhood. It’s the suppressed tradition’s version: a consciousness that develops by understanding the system more completely, that follows its experience and political knowledge to its logical conclusions rather than aestheticizing it into individual transcendence, a consciousness that fights a contemporary situation or system openly and explicitly rather than glossing itself off, retreating and dissolving, sealing into some exalted interior private and ultimately limited aesthetic experience.

The recursive structure is novelistic in that it resembles the technique of certain modernist novels that circle their subject rather than approaching it linearly, each return adding a new angle rather than simply restating the previous one. The essay opens, reopens, opens again. Each layer adds something the previous layer could not have put in place or made as vivid. This circularity is an ebb and flow of consciousness, a growth by accretion, each return adding clarity rather than complexity for its own sake — though increased clarity can involve increased complexity.

The opening sections of the examined novels are of course directly novelistic themselves, the opening passages of twenty-one novels placed in sequence make the argument through direct experience rather than assertion alone. The reader encounters Hemingway’s flat declaratives and Gold’s kinetic streets in sequence, and the comparison demonstrates the argument while the discourse contextualizes it. That’s what the best and most thoroughgoing novels often do.

This essay’s subject and its form are in the same relationship as the suppressed novels’ subjects and their forms. Those writers could not separate formal choices from political content because they were expressing their pressing reality from the inside, explosive rather than elegiac, not as observers detached and distant. This essay is in the same condition. It’s written from inside the suppression it documents, published outside the institutional channels it indicts, by a writer whose own work has followed the same trajectory as the writers being recovered. My counterhegemonic and explicit contemporaneous anti-war, anti-capitalist, and anti-empire dramatizations are dispossessed. The canonical writers were also inside their subjects, but inside positions the system rewarded for staying there. Their interiority was deemed universal, their suffering tragedy, their world representative. The dispossessed writers were equally inside their subjects but inside positions the system punished rather than rewarded. This project is in the same condition as the latter. That’s not a metaphor. It’s the condition of the project that connects directly to the tradition of dispossessed people’s literature it documents, as if it were a dispossessed novel itself.

Several lines of argument in this project could be further developed and haven’t been because the extra focus isn’t worth it, or can be left to others. I could do more sustained close readings, placing actual passages from the suppressed and canonical novels in direct sequence and analyzing the language and scenes directly and minutely rather than characterizing the novels in general. The academic establishment would demand this as the price of admission to serious critical argument. This essay declines to pay that price, for reasons that are themselves part of the argument. The openings are the close reading. Placing those thirteen passages in sequence without editorial intervention and letting the reader experience them directly is the demonstration. The reader who encounters Gold’s Lower East Side and Hemingway’s Italian plain in immediate sequence and still insists the canonical novel is aesthetically superior is either defending a prior ideological commitment or values the fancified aesthetic over the direct one, which is a difference of values, not a difference of evidence. The demand for academic close reading assumes the aesthetic argument must be made using the establishment’s methodology. But that methodology was designed to make the suppressed tradition look inferior. Submitting the argument to it would be like asking the canonical gatekeepers to judge their own mechanisms of suppression.

The establishment’s aesthetic criteria are not neutral. They are arbitrary, bogus, and unevenly applied for reasons of ideology rather than art. That said, the suppressed novels meet even those crimped and rigged standards, and exceed them. This matters not because the establishment’s standards deserve deference but because it demolishes any remaining defense of the canonical hierarchy — that whatever the politics, the canonical novels are simply better art. They are not. The artistic suppression of the people’s liberatory literature was political rather than literary, despite what was claimed both fraudulently and perhaps unwittingly. It had to be a fundamentally political and cultural rejection, because the art and the aesthetics of the great suppressed works match and surpass those of the establishment canon. If you really want to demonstrate this at staggering length by the establishment’s own rules, it can be done. This essay declines to do so not because the case couldn’t be made but because making it on the establishment’s terms concedes too much to an inferior methodology.

The criteria this essay applies instead are those of vitality over performance, truth over manner, democratic reach over cultivated exclusion, structural vision over aesthetic evasion, full humanity over partial humanity, societal revelation over societal obfuscation and distortion, and all at skilled and accomplished levels of aesthetics and art. By these more comprehensive and meaningful criteria, the suppressed novels are plainly the superior literature. More direct, more honest, more immediate, more structurally seeing, more democratically expansive, more fully human, more formally accomplished by any aesthetic measure. They are profound and expansive but not excessive, not mannered, not trivial or diversionary like establishment works. They reveal what the canonical tradition was built to conceal — the full range of human values, human costs, and human possibilities. The canonical novels fail at their own grandest ambitions because their evasions and class position cripple them from the inside. They aestheticize where they should critique, perform where they should reveal, retreat into manner and literary device where they should confront and clarify. The suppressed tradition carries more weight, more life, more truth, more liveliness, by any literary standard you care to apply. It expresses a greater consciousness, greater personal and social sight, in greater works of art, the greater literature.

It may seem that the suppressed tradition should wholly replace the establishment canon. If forced to choose one or the other, and you want the more fully human literature, you choose the suppressed one. It also has the better works of art. But the suppression has been so total that quantitatively — not qualitatively, but quantitatively — there is less of it than you would want. And parts of the establishment canon have real formal and aesthetic interest and genuine if limited insight into the establishment world and consciousness — the psychologies of the propertied, the self-justifications of the privileged, the anxieties and pleasures of those the system rewards — inadvertently revealing, if critically read, what the system does to consciousness even among its beneficiaries. It can be tough to take, hard to tolerate, but there is the polish and tight insight of Wharton, the breezy social intelligence of Lewis, the genteel mild dissent of Fitzgerald, even some of Hemingway’s finely turned banalities are occasionally worth the otherwise gutted read. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, Henry Adams’s Democracy — the privileged vantage occasionally yields something interesting and stylistically not overwrought, if inescapably white and male and thoroughly entitled. These works don’t compare in the essentials and vitals of full human consciousness, not to McNickle, Gold, Thurman, Hughes, Larsen, Smedley, McKay, nor in whole artful effect. But quantitatively there is far more of them. Too bad you too often need to go through too much to get too little. But so it is.

Recognizing that the fake canon was built on the suppression of better work should change everything — what gets read, what gets taught, what gets written, what gets imagined as possible. Novelists who internalize the suppressed tradition can begin to think and write anew. This holds for writers of any class. Anyone can commit to anti-war, anti-capitalist, anti-imperial consciousness, in life and in literature. Satire is one path. Insider accounts so subversive that they become treasonous to the oppressive class are another. The people’s tradition is not closed. It has been suppressed, which is different. Suppression can be reversed. The inheritance is still there. It was never destroyed, not entirely, only buried. We can know where it is, and we can learn from it, and we should.

The most necessary and most possible novels are not only those that see the structures of oppression most clearly, though that clarity is vital. They are also the most fully human and the most artful — not artful in the fancified sense but artful in an effective one, carrying the full weight of consciousness and feeling and social reality and possibility without evasion or mannered ornament. Those novels exist. The suppressed people’s liberatory tradition produced them. They are the standard — the people’s standard, the literary standard, the real standard. The imperative and greatest novels of our time and of all time.

The critique of the institutional mechanisms that buried the Big Bang can’t stop with the distant historical and ideological problems. Part Fifteen — “McGurl, Jameson, the MFA, the Pulitzer Prize, and Liberatory Scholarship” — will take the critique into the present: the contemporary critical establishment that has theorized the MFA system and the dominant pattern of American literature without recognizing what it displaced. Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009) and Frederic Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981) both require direct engagement. A very long post, next up.

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The Quantum Leap, the Economic Collapse, and the Establishment’s Response

When the Big Bang in the American novel hit in those thirteen months from January 1929 to February 1930, something happened in American literature that had no real precedent. This was not an incremental advance along an existing trajectory. This was a categorical leap in the range, depth, and fullness of human consciousness represented in the American novel. The suppressed six — McKay, Smedley, Larsen, Thurman, Gold, Hughes — and the three novels of the preceding year that extended the moment’s force — McKay’s Home to Harlem, Larsen’s Quicksand, Fauset’s Plum Bun — didn’t simply do what the pre-Big Bang tradition in the American novel had been doing better. The great people’s novels and novelists of the dispossessed did something categorically different. The full range of human consciousness and societal recognition was created without the filters the canonical tradition had always imposed. This was not the consciousness of the leisured class processing its refinements, not the sensitive individual against indifferent forces, not the community as backdrop or local color or grotesque — not James, not Wharton, not Fitzgerald, not Faulkner, not Hemingway, not Wolfe. This was the full consciousness of the dispossessed from inside the dispossession, with joy and rage and political analysis and collective vision and erotic life and revolutionary possibility all present simultaneously as a unified field. The baseline of human consciousness in these novels was an order of magnitude more fully human than anything the canonical tradition had produced or could produce given its ideological constraints. And the establishment — in both its knowing and its unknowing dimensions — was wholly unprepared for it.

The precursors had been building toward this for decades, which is why the Big Bang could happen when it did. In their key fictive works Douglass, Delany, Ridge, Harper, Griggs, Du Bois, Chesnutt, Dreiser, Sinclair, and Anderson had each approached the threshold from different angles. Each demonstrated that some element of the quantum leap was formally possible. Each was suppressed before the full achievement could accumulate into a tradition the establishment could not manage one writer at a time.

Frederick Douglass in The Heroic Slave (1853) showed Madison Washington’s revolutionary consciousness with full interiority and moral authority — the enslaved person as fully conscious political subject engaging in rebellion as a natural right — in a way that Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published the previous year, approached but did not achieve. Stowe showed Black consciousness with genuine sympathy and moral depth from outside the organic dispossessed position, legitimizing endurance and martyrdom rather than rebellion. Douglass showed it from inside the position, with full revolutionary authority, the enslaved person not as suffering saint but as political subject with the natural right to destroy the system destroying him. Martin R. Delany in Blake (1862) went farther, dramatizing an escaped revolutionary slave, Henry Holland, on a picaresque journey through the American South and Cuba to organize a slave uprising, by building a pan-African revolutionary network with an organizational and political intelligence the canonical tradition had never shown in a Black protagonist, the most explicitly revolutionary American novel of the nineteenth century. John Rollin Ridge in The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854) dramatized the dispossessed Californio’s transformation into revolutionary outlaw, defying Anglo imperial conquest, the first novel of the American West written by a Native American whose own Cherokee people had been destroyed by the same imperial conquest. The political content of the novel was stripped and buried by yellow press plagiarism (corporate sensationalism) almost immediately after publication.

Frances Harper in Minnie’s Sacrifice (1869) and Trial and Triumph (1889) focused on Black women’s political consciousness with a directness and a collective orientation that anticipated Langston Hughes’s community-focused bildungsroman by sixty years. Harper showed racial solidarity over passing, collective liberation over individual advancement, Reconstruction as a moral necessity worth dying for. She wrote for a Black working class readership that the canonical establishment did not remotely count as a literary audience. Sutton E. Griggs in Imperium in Imperio (1899) dramatized the competing logics of Black liberation, empowered integration versus wholesale geopolitical revolution, with a formal and political sophistication that the establishment canonical tradition could not conceive and that the respectable Harlem Renaissance would not attempt, self-published at his own expense and distributed through Black churches because no commercial publisher would touch it, the suppression institutional and total. W.E.B. Du Bois in The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) traced the cotton economy as a system of racial and economic exploitation from sharecropping field to Wall Street with the analytical ambition of a political economist writing in novel form. The establishment incorporated Du Bois the sociologist and the essayist while burying Du Bois the novelist dramatizing a socialist argument.

Charles Chesnutt pushed hard toward the quantum-leap achievement of the Big Bang, focusing on dispossessed consciousness and criticizing the system as criminal rather than merely cruel. The Marrow of Tradition (1901) shows the Wilmington, North Carolina coup d'état and massacre of 1898 as a historical crime, white supremacist violence destroying Black political and economic gains after Reconstruction. With Black consciousness at the center fully shown, Chesnutt approached in 1901 what McKay and Hughes and Thurman and Larsen would achieve in 1929. After publishing two story collections and three novels, his quickest-moving fourth and final novel published in his lifetime, The Colonel’s Dream (1905) dramatizes a structural critique from an opposite angle. A well-intentioned white Southern colonel attempts to build an integrated post-Reconstruction community which gets destroyed by the racial animus that made any such project impossible, the culture and society shown as too corrupt and criminal to be reformed by individual good will. The novel’s reception confirmed its argument: so hostile and so commercially unforgiving that Chesnutt stopped writing fiction entirely and returned to his law practice. The establishment destroyed the novel that showed how the establishment could not be reformed, meta-level irony, the pre-Big Bang suppression pattern blatant. The market and the critical establishment rejected a Black writer whose work dramatized the racial system as criminal with the clarity and force it deserved.

Sherwood Anderson in Marching Men (1917) dramatized collective working class consciousness as a political force embodied in physical discipline. Marching Men was the most direct white precursor to the Big Bang’s collective subject of liberation, enlightenment, and full humanity. The novel attempted to dramatize social forces that establishment political vocabularies of 1917 America couldn’t fully name, or wouldn’t, but that Gold and McKay and Smedley would explain, explore, and dramatize in great detail twelve years later. That his short story collection Winesburg, Ohio became canonical while Marching Men was buried shows the suppression pattern in miniature with Anderson. The establishment embraced the psychological atomism of small town stories and buried the political collectivism of urban industrialism. This was the buyout available to white writers that allowed Anderson to be partially canonized by the establishment while his more political work was quietly disappeared.

Theodore Dreiser in Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925) showed the economic system as the determining force in human life with a materialist clarity that the genteel tradition found intolerable. Doubleday suppressed Sister Carrie immediately after publication. But Dreiser’s dispossessed protagonists, though shown as systemically economically determined, remain individualist in rising and falling in fortune. The system is shown as cruel to those it destroys, but the collective subject, the class consciousness, the political analysis of the system as criminal rather than merely indifferent never emerges. Upton Sinclair in The Jungle (1906) came closer to the Big Bang’s collective indictment. The Chicago meatpacking system is shown as fully criminal, destroying immigrant working class people with the same mechanical indifference it uses to process animal carcasses. The exploitation is structural and total. But Sinclair’s political solution, the socialist electoral appeal at the novel’s end, is grafted on from outside the dispossessed consciousness rather than organically generated from within it. Organic expression from within the dispossessed consciousness is what the Big Bang achieved and what Sinclair only approached.

Each of these precursors approached the threshold of the quantum leap but none broke through it with the concentrated force and collective simultaneity that the Big Bang achieved. They were isolated voices, suppressible one at a time: Harper buried in the Black press, Ridge ripped off and obscured by yellow journalism, Chesnutt driven from literature by the market, Griggs self-publishing into institutional invisibility, Du Bois’s socialist novel buried while his sociology circulated, Douglass’ fiction buried while his nonfiction was partially accepted, the naturalists suppressed and attacked and self-limited by their ideological constraints. The precursors showed that the quantum leap was formally possible in the novel. The novel was capable if the writers and the times were ready. These forerunning novelists over three-quarters of a century demonstrated elements of the quantum leap individually. What they couldn’t do was achieve it collectively, simultaneously, at the concentrated density that makes a movement, that marks an epoch, that irreversibly shifts culture rather than disappearing or lingering as a series of isolated achievements.

What the Big Bang did was make isolation and ignorance impossible. Nine landmark novels in thirteen months, six of them representing the quantum leap in human consciousness, from writers working independently across different traditions, different communities, different political formations, different formal approaches, all arriving simultaneously at a collective moment of extraordinary force. McKay’s pan-African diasporic consciousness from the Marseille waterfront. Smedley’s Cherokee working class revolutionary consciousness ranging from Missouri mining camps to international independence movements. Larsen’s compressed psychological presentation of Black female consciousness navigating race, gender, and class simultaneously. Thurman’s structural analysis of how white supremacy reproduces itself inside its victims through internalized colorism. Gold’s collective portrait of immigrant Jewish working class poverty as class and community exploitation rather than an individual struggle narrative. Hughes’s blues-inflected dramatization of Black working class Kansas community life with full dignity and warmth. These were not six variations on a theme. They were six entirely distinct and entirely realized modes of consciousness of a liberatory people’s front that the American novel had never created or seen before, arriving together in the same thirteen months — plus the three 1928 novels that helped clear the ground. McKay’s Home to Harlem broke the barrier of Black working class urban life shown from inside with full joy and sexual frankness. Larsen’s continents-spanning Quicksand showed Black female psychology under simultaneous race, sex, and class pressure with a narrative focus that no American novelist had attempted at that powerful and revealing intersection. Fauset’s Plum Bun used the novel of manners against itself to expose the fraudulent values of polite society from a Black woman’s perspective. These were among the greatest, most diverse, and most fully conscious literary intelligences America and the world has ever produced, working at the highest level, at scopes far beyond that of establishment canonical literature. It was too much for the bigoted state-capitalist system to bear, too much for the literary establishment to comprehend or allow, and so they were immediately or ultimately ignored and denied, smeared and persecuted, suppressed and buried.

The establishment encountered this concentrated simultaneity without the will and critical vocabulary to evaluate it, without the institutional infrastructure to integrate it and understand it and fairly position it, and without the ideological capacity to acknowledge what it represented without dismantling the canonical hierarchy entirely. The New Critical formalism that would later be used against the Big Bang was still being constructed. Ransom and Tate and Brooks and Warren were still writing their Southern Agrarian manifestos, the full doctrine of the intentional fallacy and the affective fallacy and the autonomous text was not yet drafted into the weapon it would become. But the establishment desired it, and it was coming. Some novelists and critics recognized that something extraordinary was happening but had no framework to account for it. They scarcely do today, a century later, thus this project to frame and reframe it all. Sinclair Lewis recommended Michael Gold in his 1930 Nobel acceptance speech. Some reviewers noted the concentrated achievement of the Harlem Renaissance novels. The popularity of McKay’s Home to Harlem in 1928 followed by the many initial printings of Gold’s Jews Without Money and the commercial success of Hughes’ Not Without Laughter in 1930 suggested a mass readership. The literary establishment in its clueless and willfully ignorant aspects, in its bigoted and imperial ideologies, did not know what hit it and did not want to know. And still don’t.

But the establishment in its knowing dimensions likely recognized the threat as obvious and organized a response without delay. The same year the Big Bang was completing its thirteen months, the institutional forces of suppression were already in motion. The prize culture had rewarded Sinclair Lewis with a Pulitzer in 1925 (which Lewis declined), a Nobel in 1930, and then later Faulkner and Hemingway with Pulitzers and Nobels while ignoring Gold and McKay and Smedley and Hughes entirely. The publishing establishment channeled its promotional resources toward the propertied entitled canonical three rather than the liberatory dispossessed suppressed six. The critical vocabulary of aesthetic complexity and political irrelevance was sharpened specifically against the direct and collective consciousness the Big Bang had achieved — against communism, socialism, anarchism, and against democracy and politics itself. The establishment couldn’t yet fully name what the dispossessed six had done, and didn’t attempt to, but could feel its implications clearly enough to work at marginalizing it. The people’s literary tradition focused on the dispossessed, on injustice, on liberation, racially diverse, collectively conscious, politically explicit, and formally serious. This was incompatible with the white supremacist capitalist order that the canonical construction was instinctively built to camouflage and protect. The choice was binary, if not always consciously understood as such: acknowledge what the dispossessed six had achieved, which would have required dismantling the canonical hierarchy, or suppress it and elevate something else. The establishment chose suppression of the people’s greatest literature in favor of entitled propertied narratives. That choice is what this essay documents and condemns.

Then the economic catastrophe arrived at the exact moment that the Big Bang was completing its eruption. The October 1929 stock market crash initiated the Great Depression seven months after the Big Bang’s first novel appeared and four months before its last. The timing was not coincidental in either direction. The socialist and liberatory movements that produced the Big Bang were themselves a response to the contradictions of the same capitalist economy that collapsed in October. The Big Bang was both the harvest of decades of working class and Black liberation and feminist organizing against the system, and the system’s own implosion arriving simultaneously, confirming in catastrophic real time everything the suppressed tradition argued. Jews Without Money went through fifteen printings in 1930 alone as the Depression made Gold’s Lower East Side poverty suddenly immediate to a vastly expanded audience. The proletarian literary tradition both flourished and struggled through the backlash of the 1930s as the economic catastrophe confirmed the socialist analysis and consciousness. The people’s novelists didn’t need the Great Depression to write about the bigoted capitalist system that produced catastrophic economic and social realities for many at the best of times — not during the “Roaring Twenties,” not ever.

Unfortunately, for the most part, the economic collapse destroyed the material conditions under which the suppressed writers could continue producing. Gold, Smedley, McKay, Hughes, Larsen, Thurman were not propertied. They had no cushion. The Depression hit them directly and personally as lived condition rather than as subject matter. Smedley published additional books, based on her reporting, but not another novel. Nor did Gold, his creative energies consumed by political journalism and organizational work as the Depression and political repression undermined whatever economic stability he had managed. Larsen never published again after the spurious plagiarism accusation of 1930 destroyed her momentum at the moment the Depression was destroying whatever economic stability she had. She worked as a nurse for the rest of her life. Thurman died at thirty-two in 1934 with three novels published, the physical and psychological costs of poverty and overwork and tuberculosis among the direct causes. McKay also had three novels published by 1934 but three subsequent novels were rejected from publication for cultural and political reasons, two in the 1930s and one in the 1940s. Well more than half a century would pass before they could be read. The canonical writers were differently positioned. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Wolfe had Scribner’s institutional might behind them. The Depression was their subject matter rather than lived catastrophe. The economic buffer of prior success and institutional support sustained careers far more likely destroyed without it. The Depression widened the gap between the two traditions rather than leveling it. The propertied writers survived it as writers, while the dispossessed writers had the material and ideological ground cut from under them at the moment they had achieved their greatest work.

The Depression also created the political conditions that eventually enabled the anti-left, anti-liberatory Cold War suppression to be fully weaponized. Economic desperation made socialist and communist organizing more threatening to the establishment. The New Deal’s partial concessions had to be made while the establishment organized to reverse them. The rise of fascism in Europe both clarified the stakes and complicated the American left’s political positioning. World War Two and America’s wartime alliance with the Soviet Union were followed immediately by Cold War hostility. The suppression that came in the 1940s and 1950s was not a separate historical development from the Big Bang. It was the establishment’s full organized response to what the Big Bang had helped achieve — a psychological, cultural, and political awakening. The suppressions of HUAC, loyalty oaths, FBI surveillance, and blacklisting were built specifically to destroy what the Big Bang represented — a liberatory socialist revolution in culture and consciousness.

As part of the capitalist world blowing up in World War One, in the Great Depression, in World War Two, and amid the non-stop attacks against socialism throughout the socialist era and far beyond, three killer social forces converged simultaneously against the Big Bang and its tradition, each reinforcing the others in a way that made the suppression total. 1) The ideological force. The establishment recognized the quantum leap in human consciousness as a threat to the canonical hierarchy and organized the New Critical formalism, the prize culture, the MFA system as its response. 2) The institutional force. The FBI files, the passport seizures, the blacklists, the loyalty oath doctrines, the HUAC hearings, the Red Scares first and second, all the gunpowder of the state-capitalist suppression blasted against the most politically serious tradition in American literary history. And 3) the sheer economic force. The Great Depression destroyed the material conditions for the suppressed writers’ continued production while vindicating their political analysis. The paradox was that the collapse made the socialist tradition more politically relevant and simultaneously more physically vulnerable. The dispossessed writers’ lack of economic viability left them exposed to a catastrophe that the canonical writers could largely absorb.

The quantum leap the Big Bang achieved — the fullest, most racially diverse, most politically serious, most formally accomplished collective literary expression America had ever produced — was prepared by seven or eight decades of precursors, through Douglass and Ridge, Delany and Harper, Griggs and Chesnutt, Du Bois and Sinclair, Dreiser and Anderson, then erupting simultaneously from six directions in thirteen months through Gold and McKay, Hughes and Smedley, Larsen and Thurman. It was met by the full blast of all three killer social forces at once. That the people’s liberatory literary tradition survived at all, that the novels exist and can be read and are being recovered, is itself extraordinary. That it was suppressed so completely for so long is the great scandal of American literary history. That the suppression continues is equally clear. The establishment replacement aesthetic, the prize culture’s tokenizing and discriminating, the MFA system’s political timidity, the contemporary novel’s retreat from systemic critique into individual psychology and historical displacement — these forces all falsely separate the public from the private, the political from the personal, the collective from the individual. They falsify and trivialize, depoliticize and discriminate, persecute and bury. The Big Bang’s quantum leap has still not been fully understood and embraced, still not been wholly built upon, still not been allowed to become the foundation of American literary culture that it showed it was and ought to be.

The work of this project, this long critical essay and manifesto, is to help make that transformation possible. The quantum leap happened before in a big way. It can happen again — systematically and institutionally, in culture and consciousness, in literary art and otherwise. It must.

Toni Morrison, in her 1973 Foreword to Sula, identified the oppressive ideology of the establishment:

In the fifties, when I was a student, the embarrassment of being called a politically minded writer was so acute, the fear of critical derision for channeling one’s creativity toward the state of social affairs so profound, it made me wonder: Why the panic? The flight from any accusation of revealing an awareness of the political world in one’s fiction turned my attention to the source of the panic and the means by which writers sought to ease it. What could be so bad about being socially astute, politically aware in literature? Conventional wisdom agrees that political fiction is not art; that such work is less likely to have aesthetic value because politics—all politics—is agenda and therefore its presence taints aesthetic production.

Morrison indicates the catastrophe. The McCarthyite suppression blacklisted individuals and helped retroactively reframe and disappear the entire 1929 moment, elevating Faulkner and Hemingway as the literary modernists worth studying while treating Gold, Smedley, McKay, Hughes, Thurman, and Larsen as sociological documents at best. The aesthetic versus political distinction that the New Criticism enforced was applied retrospectively to 1929 in ways that shaped what subsequent generations of writers and scholars thought that moment meant.

The New Criticism that dominated academic literary study from the 1940s through the 1960s — close reading, the text as autonomous object, the intentional fallacy, no biography, no history, no politics — was designed to make “radical” literature unreadable as radical literature, to eviscerate the liberatory and socially perceptive elements of consciousness and art, of intellect and psychology. You could study The Grapes of Wrath as symbolism but not as a political argument about capitalism. In criticism, the effect was to make explicit political commitment seem naive, unsophisticated, unliterary. The highest aesthetic praise went to concepts like subtle, complex, ambiguous, paradox, and nuance, rather than to bold, clear, direct, compelling, and indicting. Direct political statement became evidence of aesthetic failure. This created a critical vocabulary that systematically disadvantaged the people’s greatest literature, the liberatory tradition and tendency documented here, while elevating the ironic, the ambiguous, and the formally self-conscious — a literature mannered and emptied.

The MFA system that expanded from the 1960s onward institutionalized a particular aesthetic — Carveresque minimalism, the well-crafted private personal story, the epiphanic moment, studied political neutrality, which is itself a political position. This is in many ways the pedagogical heir of Cold War anti-communist literary values. The pipeline from McCarthyite cultural politics to MFA program aesthetic assumptions is real and underexamined. The workshop has produced a house style that is technically proficient and imaginatively timid, that is socially, intellectually, and humanly gutted — optimized for the imperial tastes of establishment agents, editors, and prize committees who are themselves products of the same retrograde hegemonic institutions and ideologies, all the while casting themselves as enlightened and open-minded.

The suppression is accelerating under Donald Trump and his henchmen. The assault on universities, on diversity initiatives, on anything that exposes the oppressive imperial plutocrat system as a willfully debilitating system rather than a series of unfortunate individual failures. This is the new and ongoing McCarthyism with similar targets and the same fundamental aim: to prevent the kind of comprehensive, politically serious, aesthetically realized, wholly humanly conscious and socially perceptive literature that the 1929 group achieved, and that Daughter of Earth achieved most completely, from being written, published, taught, or read. The lobotomy is being performed again, the brainwashing continuous, with new and old instruments, on the same populations, for the same reasons. And the zombification of American literature continues.

James Baldwin in a 1979 interview with the New York Times saw part of what was at stake:

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is perfectly indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

In 1941, Kenneth Burke in “The Nature of Art Under Capitalism,” The Philosophy of Literary Form, named the formal problem:

Since pure art makes for acceptance, it tends to become a social menace in so far as it assists us in tolerating the intolerable... under conditions of competitive capitalism there must necessarily be a large corrective or propaganda element in art. Art cannot safely confine itself to merely using the values which arise out of a given social texture and integrating their conflicts. It must have a definite hortatory function, an educational element of suasion or inducement; it must be partially forensic. Such a quality we consider to be the essential work of propaganda … a propaganda art. … And incidentally, our distinction as so stated should make it apparent that much of the so-called ‘pure’ art of the nineteenth century was of a pronouncedly propagandist or corrective coloring.

[If art] leads us to a state of acquiescence at a time when the very basis of moral integration is in question, we get a paradox whereby the soundest adjunct to ethics, the aesthetic, threatens to uphold an unethical condition.

In 1932, V.F. Calverton in The Liberation of American Literature understood what the proletarian tradition was attempting — the politicized socially conscious, class conscious, working class and dispossessed socialist tradition:

Proletarian writers are more interested in social revolt than in literary revolt... they are convinced that present-day industrial society is based upon exploitation and injustice...

More than that, proletarian writers believe that their literature can serve a greater purpose only when it contributes, first, toward the destruction of present-day society, and, second, toward the creation of a new society which will embody … a social, instead of an individualistic ideal. Unlike Ibsen, they do not ask questions and then refuse to answer them. Unlike the iconoclasts, they are not content to tear down the idols and stop there. Their aim is to answer questions as well as ask them, and to provide a new order to replace an old one. Their attitude, therefore, is a positive instead of a negative one. …

In a word, the revolutionary critic does not believe that we can have art without craftsmanship; what he does believe is that, granted the craftsmanship, our aim should be to make art serve man as a thing of action and not man serve art as a thing of escape.

These three critical views together — Morrison on the panic around political fiction, Burke on the social menace of pure art, Calverton on the socialist commitment to answering rather than merely asking — help define the people’s liberatory tradition in literature. The dispossessed liberatory six of the Big Bang wrote as Burke and Calverton describe, and the canonical mechanisms suppressed them by the means that Morrison identified: coding political seriousness as aesthetic failure, coding direct statement as propaganda, coding collective consciousness as sociology rather than literature.

The suppression of 1929 didn’t just bury specific writers. It gradually produced a literary culture so thoroughly shaped by Cold War requirements that the insurgent imagination is now largely self-suppressing. Writers internalize the standard before they write the first sentence, optimizing for the market and the workshop and the prize before the political content that would disqualify them ever reaches the page.

What is being published and lauded in enormous quantities is what might be called the novel of individual interiority under late capitalism. It comes in several recognizable varieties that are all essentially the same novel wearing different clothes. The domestic family trauma novel: someone returns home, family secrets are revealed, wounds are examined, partial reconciliation follows. The immigrant assimilation novel: a first or second generation immigrant navigates between cultures, identity is negotiated, belonging is achieved or elegantly mourned. The autofiction novel: a thinly veiled version of the author processes their own psychological and artistic development with extreme interiority and formal self-consciousness — the apotheosis of the James tradition, self-reflecting consciousness as the primary subject, the economic base producing the leisure enabling that consciousness all but invisible. The historical atrocity novel: slavery, the Holocaust, colonialism, serious subjects tiptoed into from a safe historical distance, with redemptive or dignified individual arcs. The MFA novel: formally accomplished, emotionally exquisite, politically limited — strangely mute, stripped of cutting-edge consciousness, social and political perception and possibilities.

What unites all of these establishment fixations is that they are all novels of adjustment full of characters adjusting to loss, to identity, to family, to history, to their own psychology. Adjustment, as befits accommodation, and as opposed to revolution and social change. The oppressive systems are the weather they’re adjusting to, and their legitimacy or immovability is the assumption they’re adjusting within. None of them explicitly lay bare the weather as criminal and go the next step in consciousness or perception, drama or action. The imperial establishment prefers, and insists, that its literary stars rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic, while the literary ship goes full speed through seas of icebergs on all sides. The important thing is the deck chairs to make the ride on the ship comfortable, as long as it lasts.

The novel continues to make the formally unnecessary move of retreating from collective liberatory subjects to private individual ones, or subjects at a far historical or geopolitical distance — the family, the self, the immigrant individual, the consciousness processing its own experience, times gone by, turmoil in far-off lands, or the displaced futures and fantasies of dystopia and speculative fiction. Meanwhile, the community as subject, the class as subject, the colonized people as subject, the revolutionary as subject, systemic injustice, genocide, war, climate collapse, explicit and contemporary in exploration, the direct formal approach the suppressed tradition deeply engaged, are marginal to or structurally subordinated within the most lauded literary fiction of this century, and of the establishment at all times. When they appear they appear despite the establishment, not because of it. The literary imagination reaches for displacement rather than direct engagement with the present. Why? The establishment wills it so. Vital content is gutted, and so crucial form is destroyed. The novel has never been better written at the sentence level. It has rarely been less capable of telling the direct profound truth about the present moment. It’s considered an act of defamation, literary and otherwise. Needed now more than ever are explicit and scathing institutional defamation novels, and their liberatory revolutionary counterparts.

The retreat into historical and futurist fiction is the establishment literary imagination’s response to an apparently unwritable present, unwritable not because the material does not exist but because writing about it directly and honestly requires the formal and normative commitments that the canon was built to exclude, built to belittle, decry, and deny. The historical plantation novel and the alien dystopia are the forms available to a literary culture that cannot look directly at what it is doing right now.

The contemporary liberatory novel that does what the tradition demands would treat surveillance capitalism, the police state, the Pentagon, the private prison industry, pharmaceutical predation, the military-financial complex owning and controlling the economy, the fossil fuel companies’ climate science suppression, the billionaire class and its ownership of politics, media, and culture, the plutocracy’s lackey American President and Congress and Chief Justices — it would treat these institutions as rampaging antagonists with the same formal weight and interiority that the canonical tradition reserves for individual sensitive consciousness. The board meeting where the decision gets made. The lobbyist delivering the payment. The general authorizing the vaporizing strike. The algorithm deciding whose mortgage gets approved. The prison contractor’s quarterly earnings call. The murderous directives, rulings, and laws of the plutocrat President, judges, and other officials. These institutional derangements should all be fronted by heightened Javert figures who exist in reality or who are emblematic of it, and they should be opposed by their revolutionary counterparts, who have never appeared in lauded American literary fiction nearly enough as primary subjects created with the full force that the novel can formally provide. It’s not enough to rewrite the novels of the Big Bang a century gone by. We must advance beyond their great accomplishment, and simultaneously acknowledge and understand what the people’s front novels achieved in and of themselves, and also as compared to the existing canon, to help consider what must be attempted now.

The contemporary American novelist who names the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs, the CIA’s rendition and torture contractors, the financial instruments that produced the 2008 crash, and the people who designed and implemented them knowing what they would do — who directly exposes the most prominent officials and executives in the most prominent offices, and so actually confronts the central reality and consciousness of the age — faces not just unpublishability but potentially the kind of institutional retaliation that the security state has long directed at journalists and whistleblowers. That’s because contemporary power is not merely corrupt or abstractly systemic but concretely criminal, and because those who administer it remain socially protected. Such novelists would be doing more than “writing about the present,” if they could get published at all. They would be confronting the organized criminality of contemporary American power. That’s why they won’t be — not in the imperial establishment.

The ceiling on the contemporary liberatory novel isn’t just market logic and MFA aesthetics and forms, content and ideology. It’s the direct institutional power of the villains the novel would need to name. That’s not a reason not to write the novels. It’s a description of what the novel is up against and why the people’s liberatory tradition, dispossessed and repressed, is more necessary and more suppressed now than at any point since the Red Scares and the Cold War.

Forward moving contemporary American novelists need to do more than register atmosphere or generalized dread or existential angst, even though liberatory narrative is a prohibited form. Direct representation of elite criminality and revolutionary necessity risks not only cultural exclusion but forms of institutional retaliation more commonly associated with journalism and whistleblowing. Any difficulty must be faced. The new is news, and the novel is inherently both new and news. What’s topical blends with the eternal. What’s most life-giving creates consciousness of the most alive kind. What’s imperative gives sight, focus, direction, power. What’s circumstantial feeds infinity. We must piece it together — the world, consciousness, the future, story.

Mary McCarthy notes in her suggestive essay, “Characters in Fiction” (1961) in On the Contrary:

The distinctive mark of the novel [as compared to other forms of fiction] is its concern with the actual world, the world of fact, of the verifiable, of figures, even, and statistics. If I point to Jane Austen…Eliot… Tolstoy… Faulkner, it will be admitted…different as they are…they have one thing in common: a deep love of fact, of the empiric element in experience. I am not interested in making a formal definition of the novel…but in finding its quidditas or whatness, the essence or binder that distinguishes it from other species of prose fiction: the tale, the fable, the romance. The staple ingredient present in all novels in various mixtures and proportions but always in fairly heavy dosage is fact.

McCarthy traces the early history of the novel, ‘the birthmarks’1:

The word novel goes back to the word “new,” and in the plural it used to mean news – the news of the day or year…. Many of the great novelists were newspaper reporters or journalists [and “students” of criminals and prisons] “confirmed prison-visitors”…Defoe…Dickens…Dostoevsky…and Victor Hugo …Tolstoy…. Coming to the twentieth century, you meet the American novelist as newspaperman: Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway, O’Hara, Faulkner himself…. Novels carried the news – of crime, high society, politics, industry, finance, and low life…. The epic, I might put in here, is the form of all literary forms closest to the novel; it has the “boiler plate” [”durable informative matter”], the lists and catalogues, the circumstantiality, the concern with numbers and dimensions. The epic geography, like that of the novel, can be mapped, in both the physical and social sense…. Whenever the chance arises, Jane Austen supplies a figure.

Note that McCarthy’s list of twentieth century American journalist-novelists — Dreiser, Lewis, Hemingway, O'Hara, Faulkner — includes several of the canonical gatekeepers this essay criticizes. The actual great news-bearing, fact-saturated, empirically grounded novelists of the Big Bang — Gold, McKay, Smedley, Hughes, Larsen, Thurman — go entirely unmentioned. That absence speaks volumes. It’s the suppression pattern operating inside a critical essay about the novel’s own underlying nature. McCarthy makes the case for exactly the kind of novel the Big Bang achieved, then omits the Big Bang entirely, the source of the greatest American novels. The blind spot is the argument.

The system that buried the writers of 1929 and 1930 is the same system operating today. The techniques and institutions have been modernized — the blacklist replaced by imperial market ideology, HUAC replaced by establishment MFA and prize culture — but the function is identical. Suppress the novels that expose the system as criminal. Block and disqualify, belittle and smear the novels — or even the idea of the novels — that explicitly expose the crimes and embody the most fully liberatory consciousness. Make it all unthinkable. And if thinkable, unviable. And if viable, punished and persecuted. And reward the novels that play it safe, wittingly or otherwise, the novels that adapt to the lobotomized oppression of the respectable literary establishment. The novels that accommodate the strictures of genocidal and ecocidal imperialism. Reward the novels that gut consciousness and social and political reality by their sins of omission, their inability or unwillingness to think things all the way through in the first place. Reward the players, and the unwittingly played. Punish the greater peoples’ literature, the greater vision and impact, the larger consciousness and social sight. Ban it from existence. Punish the cultural forces — the overtly antiwar, explicitly anti-empire, the liberatory socialist revelations — that refuse to die, that reject empire, that decline to be conquered. All in the name of the counterfeit universalisms, posing as civilized discourse, that empire uses to cloak its lethal operations.

What needs to be built is a critical vocabulary adequate to this suppressed tradition — one that can recognize and engage with the imperative qualities of the novels of McKay, Smedley, Gold, Hughes, Thurman, Larsen, Tsiang, and McNickle, and other revelatory works going forward and back through time, essential works that have been largely or entirely systematically excluded by the canon.

What needs to be built is a writing and reading culture, an artistic and intellectual culture, a common culture that far surpasses the imperial establishment, that understands what is at stake — a culture that recognizes the imperial canon as an ideological document and weapon, one that understands suppressions as political rather than literary acts, one that insists on recovering what was buried and evaluating it with the full consideration it deserves, one that creates a new people’s liberatory literature. If you’re trying to engage with the American literary canon in the novel, and if you are not centrally engaging these premier suppressed works of the dispossessed people’s liberatory tradition, and creating from the deep well of this greater tendency in literature and art, then you’re engaging with a false, wildly erroneous, and bigoted imperial canon that is eviscerated of the bulk of life and consciousness and novelistic art and knowledge that has been lived and known and expressed in the American novel, and that might yet be.

The potential impacts of a far more accurate and meaningful canon are extraordinary — including what it would mean for living writers who would inherit a far richer and more honest tradition to write from and against, one that validates formal achievement in the service of the dispossessed and the liberatory and revolutionary rather than as a monument to the sensibility of the privileged, one that demonstrates the novel’s capacity to explore collective historical experience through individual consciousness across the full spectrum of American life. Writers working today in the traditions of McKay, Gold, Smedley, Hughes, Larsen, Thurman, Tsiang, and McNickle would understand themselves not as marginal or insurgent exceptions to a dominant tradition but as heirs to the central and most vital current of literary history in America and the world.

A canon built on the liberatory Big Bang rather than its suppression would change not only how we read and understand the past but what the future of American literature knows and feels itself to be capable of creating and imagining. Utterly recreating the canon, accurately recreating the canon, and expanding upon it — the result would be a whole new theory and culture, a whole new reality and new possibilities, a whole new literary Big Bang and world.

The lobotomy can be reversed, the brainwashing cast off. Not by any single act but by the accumulated practice of reading the suppressed tradition with the seriousness it deserves, of building the critical vocabulary that can recognize what it achieves, of insisting in every available forum that the canonical story is a political story told in the interests of power, and by writing the kind of novels, the kind of consciousness, that sees society whole and shows the human consequences and possibilities with the fullness they demand.

The best least canonical novels of 1929 and 1930 saw life whole. Agnes Smedley may have seen it most completely. The work of seeing the world whole, and of helping others see it, is not finished, and never will be.

A quick reflection on each of the openings of the six lauded canonical establishment novels considered here, and the eight buried dispossessed people’s novels:

Henry James’s opening is the performance of privileged consciousness that is elaborately qualified, temporizing, assuming a reader with infinite leisure to follow its circling. Thomas Wolfe’s opening is pretentious, and yet clumsy, pervasively. William Faulkner is mannered and seems simultaneously callous and cutesy. Ernest Hemingway’s opening too is mannered, flat, and dull even given any intent to convey a kind of stoic or wounded psychology or sensibility. At least it’s not as bad as James, Wolfe, and Faulkner. The best of the canonical establishment here are Wharton and Fitzgerald, whose openings seem most fully human, though somewhat excruciatingly confined to the upper crust, among a cloistered and privileged, entitled and oblivious suppressive elite.

Now consider the openings of the people’s novels. Not one is pretentious, not one is mannered, not one garrulous, not one is too cute for its own good. Thus, immediately, the buried people’s novels indicate that they are aesthetically better, more well wrought, than most of the glorified canonized novels, and at least as aesthetically equal otherwise. The buried people’s novels are also far more broadly ranging and weightier than the heralded novels of the establishment canon. They are both aesthetically and normatively more imperative and more accomplished — thus, far greater art.

Agnes Smedley opens as if from an ominous emotional grave by the Danish sea while alluding to an epic view and vantage from the bottom of society and great possibility for the future. Michael Gold’s opening in the streets on the Lower East Side of Manhattan may be the most lively opening of all, an exploration of a seemingly infinite mix of people, motion, and hard life. Langston Hughes’ opening is a lively swirl of domestic chaos and security, of coming trouble amid human warmth. Claude McKay opens with a scenic and lively ramble among migrants on a Mediterranean beach. Wallace Thurman cuts direct deep to the heart and to the intellect with transparent social and psychological critique, straight to the emotive, dramatic, imperative point. D’Arcy McNickle could not be more transparent, nor more direct and immediate as well by setting scene and delineating family and status and class positions in one swift motion. H.T. Tsiang opens with aggressive bluntness, prose stripped of all elite ornamentation, a political cartoon of the dispossessed given novelistic form, as if respectable style were a class position he refused to occupy. Nella Larsen’s prose is delicate, as delicate as dangerous, a danger she intimates up front and moves piercingly through.

Weighty and lively as can be, with accomplished aesthetics — this is great art. These are the great novels of the people, the real canon, the novels of the dispossessed, liberatory minded and eyed, buried for ideological reasons by the establishment canon of propertied novelists and entitled focus — buried by concerns of wealth and white supremacy, empire and privilege, imperial culture celebrated by the dehumanized establishment. The liberatory dispossessed novels are better art and better for humanity — more fully human, more culturally necessary, carrying the revolutionary sight and consciousness the world has always needed and needs now.

You can often tell by the sound of a read to what extent writers are bullshitting or not — when they are not conveying the meaning they think they are, or not as much meaning as they seem to presume they are. Here, among the canonicals, James, Wolfe, Faulkner, and Hemingway are bullshitting, if Hemingway somewhat less so. Wharton and Fitzgerald are lost to their rich privilege, even, Fitzgerald notes in the text self-admittedly, “snobbishly” so. Meanwhile, the people’s novelists are not bullshitting. They are neither privileged nor seeking privilege. In fact, they are searingly insightful and forward-looking. They are the most truly civilized and cultured, this group of eight, as if they are incapable of conforming to the deceiving and self-deceptive culture and consciousness of the privileged and propertied, supremacist and capitalist empire. They are shut out from the establishment, and reject conditioning by it, and do not manipulate their way about. They tell the truth direct, seemingly the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about human consciousness and the state of the world, to the best of their abilities.

The canon and its construction are an embarrassment and outrage, in very large part. What was done to American literature, and beyond, is a scandal, and it has been part of and resulted in cultural and political catastrophe. This all goes far beyond the novel and the literary novel, but the literary novel is deeply implicated and profoundly emblematic of the crises of consciousness and material conditions that confront and consume America and the world today. The dispossessed suppressed liberatory novels of the people are the greatest novels of their time, and all time, and their suppression is among the greatest losses in literary and cultural history.

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The Establishment Zombie Canon Versus the People’s Liberatory Tradition:
The Entitled Sensitive Victim and the Lobotomizing Critical Weaponry

The consciousnesses of the establishment canonical novel frequently show that society is cruel to its privileged sensitive members, not that the social and economic systems are illegitimate and most criminal to the least among us. The toll that state-capitalist society, capitalist empire, takes on those below — the abuse, the horror, the disfigurement, the injustice — remains largely buried, as do the consciousnesses of those below, except as minor feature, local color, or grotesques.

The economic system is in the background. Hemingway’s protagonists across his central era 1925 to 1940 — Jake Barnes, Frederic Henry, Robert Jordan — are all men of sensitivity and a kind of masculine or class code destroyed or diminished by forces larger than themselves: war, history, the universe’s indifference. The working class appears in passing, as peasants, bartenders, admirable primitives. The economic structure is basically invisible, accepted. Mainly individual conduct matters, not collective. This is the consciousness that is modeled, celebrated, allowed.

Fitzgerald dramatizes the American Dream of economic, personal, and social ascendancy and sees the “valley of ashes” beneath it, but Fitzgerald’s emotional investment is in rich man Gatsby’s romantic sensitivity, not in worker Wilson’s exploitation. Faulkner’s sensitive soul protagonist Harvard student Quentin Compson is driven to suicide, destroyed by the chaos of his family and his archaic sense of honor. The aftermath of slavery appears as gothic atmosphere rather than denunciation, refracted through white consciousness and drama, not guilt, not reckoning, not comprehension. The more convoluted Faulkner’s celebrated elaborate prose gets, the less it actually seems to say.

Wharton’s subject is what the capitalist system does to people inside the elite, the cruelties of its social codes, the destruction of sensitive individuals like Lily Bart by its marriage market.

Henry James’s restricted point of view of the leisured-class consciousness, with its would-be exquisite moral nuance, presupposes and validates the class structure that makes such consciousness possible. Establishment liberal critic Lionel Trilling’s elevation of James to supreme American writer was an ideological, political act disguised as an aesthetic preference — a reaction against the populist social conception and consciousness defended by the early twentieth century progressive line of literary understanding led by V.L. Parrington and V.F. Calverton that New Criticism and Cold War liberal critics like Trilling would combine to crush.

Henry James was canonized as the top of the American canon despite happily emigrating to England, becoming an English citizen, and living most of his life there, just like T.S. Eliot, the supreme canonized establishment American poet. You can’t make this stuff up. James emigrated to England in 1876, the physical enactment of what his fiction does formally, turning away from the democratic, populist, diverse American reality toward the more hierarchical, more stratified, more culturally exclusive European one, moving backwards in time. T.S. Eliot followed the same trajectory in the next generation, born in St. Louis in 1888, becoming a British citizen in 1927 and converting to Anglo-Catholicism the same year in a comprehensive self-reinvention as an Englishman of a particular conservative Anglican type. He died in London in 1965 and is buried in East Coker, Somerset, the English village his ancestors left for America centuries earlier, the emigration made permanent and symbolically total. In 1939, Bernard Smith in Forces in Literary Criticism put T.S. Eliot and his literary criticism (long dominant in MFA circles) into sharp perspective in comparison to socialist criticism in America which Smith dates to 1901 with the founding of Comrade—‘An Illustrated Socialist Monthly’. Despite Bernard Smith’s best efforts toward the end of the socialist era in American literature, Eliot remains a preeminent establishment canonized American literary critic and longtime guiding light of literary criticism in MFA programs nationwide:

[T.S. Eliot wrote,] “There are two and only two finally tenable hypotheses about life: the Catholic and the materialistic [i.e., socialist]. It is quite possible, of course, that the future may bring neither a Christian nor a materialistic civilization. It is quite possible that the future may be nothing but chaos or torpor. In that event, I am not interested in the future; I am only interested in the two alternatives which seem to me worthier of interest….”

Eliot chose not only the Catholic hypothesis, but also its political corollaries. His literary opinions were thus given a firm philosophical base to rest upon, and from that fact he drew the reasonable conclusions … [that] “Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint. In so far as in any age there is common agreement on ethical and theological matters, so far can literary criticism be substantive. In ages like our own, in which there is no such common agreement, it is then more necessary for Christian readers to scrutinize their reading, especially of works of imagination, with explicit ethical and theological standards. The ‘greatness’ of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.” To this has esthetic criticism at last come—to a realization that non-esthetic criteria are the ultimate tests of value. Whether they be called philosophical, moral, or social criteria, they are still the ideas that men have about the way human beings live together and the way they ought to live. The quest of beauty had become the quest of reality. It had become, in essence, literary criticism as socially conscious and as polemical as the criticism of the Marxists….

Eliot spoke of alternatives, not of choices…. He believes that one of the alternatives has greater value, is nobler, is in a sense more real, than the other. The question is therefore not simply one of personal taste. It is a question of evidence and reason. But the alternative he favors admits of no evidence and derogates from reason. His philosophy is, in the last analysis, wholly mystical. It is not capable of being tested and verified and improved. The alternative he rejects is, on the other hand, the one that is favored by those who are determined to be as scientific as one can be in a non-physical field. The literary criticism of the neo-classicists is a criticism composed of obiter dicta inspired by intangible emotions. The literary criticism of the materialists stands or falls by the findings of the social scientists, psychologists, and historians. Eliot’s alternative involves a revulsion against democracy; the materialists are partisans of democracy. The literary criticism of his school tends to create a literature that will express the sensibilities and experiences of a few fortunate men. The criticism of the opposing school tends to create a literature that will express the ideals and sympathies of those who look forward to the conquest of poverty, ignorance, and inequality—to the material and intellectual elevation of the mass of mankind….

T.S. Eliot’s most famous collection of literary criticism, The Sacred Wood (1920), contains his most influential critical essays including “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” the essay that argued for impersonality in poetry, the submergence of the individual poet into the tradition, which became one of the foundational texts of New Criticism’s formalist program. Also significant is Selected Essays (1932), which collected his major critical pieces including “The Metaphysical Poets” and “Hamlet and His Problems” where he introduced the concept of the “objective correlative.” Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” argues that the poem should be read as an autonomous object separate from the poet’s biography, personality, and historical situation — what he calls the “extinction of personality.” The ideal poet is a medium through which tradition flows rather than an individual expressing personal experience or political commitment.

This is the theoretical position of the reactionary Southern New Critics — Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate — institutionalized in American literature as close reading methodology in the 1940s and 1950s. The text as autonomous object, the intentional fallacy, the affective fallacy, all follow logically from Eliot’s impersonality argument. That is, literary interpretation should focus exclusively on the text itself, rejecting external factors like the author’s biography (the intentional fallacy) or the reader’s emotional response (the affective fallacy) as valid standards for criticism. If the poem is separable from its historical moment, you cannot read Gold’s Jews Without Money as a political argument about immigrant poverty. That would be committing the intentional fallacy. You can only read it as formal object, patterns of imagery and irony and ambiguity. Evaluated by those formal strictures, the direct political prose of Gold or Smedley or McKay can be fraudulently disqualified as art in favor of the oblique, the ironic, the formally self-conscious. It’s a fallacious and arbitrary, political and anti-intellection critical position used to crush the people’s literature, socialist literature. It’s a big lie, and it’s used to dominant and create, validate and weaponize the retrograde establishment canon that remains so influential and in many ways dominant still today. The New Critics also fed directly off the sterile formalist lines of the voluminous literary criticism of Henry James, as we’ll see.

What made New Criticism more than aesthetic preference was who constructed the criteria. All four New Critics — three born in Kentucky, one in Tennessee — were associated with the Southern Agrarian movement — Southern reactionaries — that produced the 1930 manifesto I’ll Take My Stand, which romanticized the pre-industrial Southern social order, the civilization slavery built, and treated the Civil War’s outcome as cultural catastrophe. Tate wrote biographies of Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis. Ransom elegized the South’s defeat. Tate drew ideas from nineteenth-century proslavery theorists such as Thomas Roderick Dew and William Harper, saying “We must revive these men.” The ideological roots of the formalist program go directly to the proslavery intellectual tradition. Robert Penn Warren was more complicated. He later wrote sympathetically about the Civil Rights movement in Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965), a significant evolution, but his early Agrarian work is firmly in the reactionary Southern tradition.

Their formalist literary program — no biography, no history, no politics in literary analysis — was not a neutral methodological innovation. It was a critical vocabulary constructed by men whose own politics were indefensible under scrutiny. If you allow social and historical context into literary analysis you see what the Southern Agrarian tradition was defending. The formalist program made that sight and understanding methodologically impermissible. Ransom founded the Kenyon Review in 1939, the primary institutional vehicle for New Critical aesthetics. Later “the CIA indirectly funded the Kenyon Review through grants from the [Congress for Cultural Freedom] and even hired many of Ransom’s pupils. One of those hirees, Robie Macauley ’41, succeeded Ransom as editor of the Kenyon Review in 1959 while still working for the CIA.” The Kenyon Review had to close for a decade beginning in 1969, a few years after revelations of CIA involvement forced such support to be discontinued.

Brooks and Warren co-authored Understanding Poetry (1938), the textbook that trained multiple generations of American literature students in close reading, spreading the New Critical program through university English departments nationwide. The ideology was embedded in what presented itself as purely technical instruction in how to read a poem. Reactionary Southerners constructing a formalist critical blueprint that systematically devalued political content, collective consciousness, and social scope, because their own cultural and political commitments, and official American state and capitalist political power, needed that kind of devaluation and gutting of art to hide behind, and still do.

The affective fallacy is a New Critical doctrine formulated by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in a 1949 essay, companion piece to their earlier “The Intentional Fallacy.” Where the intentional fallacy declares it illegitimate to consider what the author intended, the affective fallacy declares it illegitimate to consider what the reader feels in response to the work. Both the author’s intention and the reader’s emotional response are ruled out of bounds as criteria for literary evaluation. What matters is only what is technical, not normative, in the text — its internal structure, its patterns of imagery, irony, ambiguity, tension, and resolution. The affective fallacy was designed to disqualify emotional response as a criterion of literary value. Emotional directness and partisan sympathy, the capacity to produce feeling and often intensely partisan sensibility in the reader, is one of the primary achievements of the suppressed tradition. Gold’s Lower East Side produces outrage and grief. Smedley’s Marie Rogers produces rage and identification. Hughes’s Kansas produces warmth and sorrow. These are not incidental effects but the novels’ central achievements, and they are made by way of great aesthetics too, formal choices that produce those responses in readers. The affective fallacy declares all such human response irrelevant to literary evaluation.

The establishment gutting of literature is more than a brainwashing and a lobotomizing, it’s an evisceration of fundamental human impulse and feeling. It’s a kind of whole-body control or erasure. It’s literary genocide — the deliberate destruction not just of books but of the tradition, the writers, the communities, and the consciousness that produced them and needed them. And it’s literary enslavement — in its ongoing structural subordination of the dispossessed tradition to the canonical hierarchy’s control. It’s important to consider and remember that these are not merely intellectual or artistic struggles, these are humanistic struggles, wholesale struggles for conscience, consciousness, and humanity.

The suppressed novels were written for and read by working class and dispossessed communities who experienced them as emotionally and politically immediate. The affective fallacy rules that experience of reading out of literary analysis entirely, including the political and emotional, psychological and ideological response of the community the novel was written for and about. It simply doesn’t count as evidence of the work’s normative value or aesthetic achievement. Only the trained critic’s formal analysis of the autonomous text counts. That’s an imperial and class operation embedded in methodology. That’s New Criticism, and other establishment formalisms. The responses of the communities these novels were written for are disqualified as naive or sentimental, while the detached formal analysis of the credentialed critic, especially about entitled types of literature, almost exclusively, almost the only conceivable kind, is elevated as the only legitimate form of literary judgment, the only legitimate type of literature. The affective fallacy is New Criticism’s tool for invalidating the kind of reading the suppressed tradition was designed to produce and deserves. New Criticism and the larger cultural suppression killed socialist literary criticism, the most incisive way to understand literature and the times, human consciousness and the world.

Postmodernism shares with New Criticism the fundamental strategy of keeping the text sealed off from direct political reference, though through a different mechanism. Where New Criticism seals the text by declaring it an autonomous aesthetic object, postmodernism seals it by declaring all political reference unstable, all meaning deferred, all grand narratives suspect. The effect is similarly destructive to literature. You cannot read Gold’s Jews Without Money as a political argument about immigrant poverty because postmodernism tells you that the text deconstructs its own claims to referential meaning, that the subject of the narrative is itself a linguistic construction, that class consciousness is a master narrative to be interrogated rather than a political reality to be named. The directness of the suppressed tradition gets dissolved in textual play rather than excluded by formalist criteria, but the result is the same. The political content is disqualified as naive realism, as unaware of its own constructedness.

Fredric Jameson analyzed this dynamic in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), arguing that postmodernism is not a neutral aesthetic development but the dominant cultural form that late capitalism produces and rewards — the cultural logic that serves multinational capital by dissolving historical consciousness, fragmenting the subject, and replacing depth with depthlessness. Jameson’s analysis confirms rather than celebrates this. He names postmodernism as a symptom of what capital does to consciousness, not as an intellectual advance. That dominant culture continues to colonize the unconscious — desocialize it, gut it of a people’s understanding of the world, a democratic and socialist understanding. This is the cultural form that “late capitalism” produces and rewards, to the benefit of big money and against the interests and values of people, for the same reasons the New Critics’ formalism was rewarded and institutionalized, because it made structural political critique and artistic social consciousness and comprehension methodologically impossible. The result has been a kind of institutionally rewarded brainwashing, mental cleansing, gutting of the people’s socially constructive and healthy minds. This creates an environment of bottomless and aimless outrage at grinding and lethal material pressures, supposedly unknowable in the postmodern sense, and then a subsequent desire for a seemingly authoritative strongman to name false enemies to attack to supposedly set things right — neofascism, Trump-style, or otherwise.

So that’s where the literary criticism of T.S. Eliot led, straight to the lobotomizing effects of New Criticism and eventually postmodernism. Both Henry James and T.S. Eliot moved their lives and literature higher up in class to Europe to inhabit a more refined and more hierarchical cultural tradition than democratic America offered. The emigration wasn’t incidental to their art and thought. It was the same impulse and ideology expressed as a life choice.

Henry James also wrote an enormous amount of influential literary criticism, some of it collected posthumously as The Art of the Novel (1934), edited by R.P. Blackmur, a New Critic. These prefaces established the critical vocabulary that the New Critics chose to inherit and use. The central concepts:

1. the central consciousness, the novel organized through a single perceiving mind through whom all action is filtered;

2. the scenic method and dramatic principle, showing rather than telling, authorial commentary suppressed in favor of staging;

3. organic form, every element subordinated to the whole, nothing loose or external;

4. and the distinction between life and art, the insistence that raw experience must be transformed by aesthetic intelligence into something shaped and complete — that merely showing life as lived is not art.

Notice that none of this is aesthetically inevitable and imperative, necessary or objective. Each criterion is a constricting preference posed as a principle — “obiter dicta” as Bernard Smith exposed it — an observation made in passing and taken as law — and each preference happens to undermine and disqualify the suppressed tradition from being great art.

The line from James’s prefaces to the New Critics to the attack on people’s liberatory literature is direct. Blackmur edited The Art of the Novel as a New Critic. When Ransom and Brooks and Tate and Warren constructed the formalist program that would bury Gold and Smedley and McKay, they worked with the tools, critical preferences and modes, that James and Eliot had already valorized.

The arbitrary and status quo ideology was imposed through technical vocabulary and precepts. James’s preference for the central consciousness is no aesthetic imperative or neutral technical insight. It’s an arbitrary preference for the novel that centers the individual perceiving mind, that treats social reality as the medium through which consciousness moves rather than as the subject to be anatomized, from his entitled perspective. His distinction between life and art directly disqualifies the testimonial and autobiographical, the socially revelatory and explicit counterhegemonic modes of the suppressed tradition. Gold’s Lower East Side shown as it was lived, Smedley’s life dramatized as she experienced it, are by Jamesian criteria pre-artistic raw material rather than literary achievement, insufficiently transformed by aesthetic intelligence, never mind the plethora of compelling aesthetic techniques and effects structured throughout both these novels.

The suppressed tradition violates virtually every Jamesian criterion simultaneously — McKay’s collective rather than central consciousness, Gold’s open documentary mode and revolutionary stance, Smedley’s direct social condemnations and partisan assertions, Hughes’s open community panorama. By Jamesian criteria rigorously applied, all four are artistically inferior to the canonical novels. That’s the criteria doing the ideological work they were constructed to do, making the suppressed tradition’s formal choices look like aesthetic failures rather than different and more honest aesthetic choices rooted in a different relationship between writer, subject, and reader.

The Jamesian critical tradition and the New Critical tradition are the same tradition — reactionary, plutocrat — expressed through different instruments, constructing a critical vocabulary that made it methodologically impossible to value what the suppressed dispossessed and socialist tradition was doing in its own right, while claiming to be purely aesthetic and purely above the political considerations that they actually served throughout. These critical frameworks — formalist, theological, postmodern — presented themselves as universal aesthetic principles while functioning as ideological instruments, each in its own way making the political content of the suppressed tradition and counterhegemony methodologically unavailable. Each declared its own arbitrary preferences as overriding timeless standards of literary value. Together across a century they constructed the critical vocabulary that made it nearly impossible to recognize what the suppressed tradition was doing, let alone to value it. The damage to consciousness and to literature, to the public, has been profound and is ongoing. Generations of bogus literary thought need to be unlearned. Arch liberals and conservatives are the true believers, but progressives and socialists are also badly infected. They too often valorize liberal artistic productions all out of proportion to their worth and value, and often in inverse proportion, all the while repeating or believing one or another “obiter dictum” of the establishment canon ideologues.

The canonical institution of this regressive ideology faces the same tactical problem in every generation — how to make the novel’s formal and emotional resources available for individual consciousness while keeping them unavailable for collective political consciousness and structural examination, prosecution, and condemnation of empire? In every generation it constructs an arbitrary or subjective new critical vocabulary to enforce the separation, in guise of objectivity, universality, and timelessness. High Modernism! New Criticism! Postmodernism! Metamodernism! New Criticism excluded political content by declaring the text an autonomous object. Canonically constructed modernism evacuated it through its impersonality doctrines and the elevation of formal difficulty, though modernism itself is more complicated, since the formal innovations of Larsen, McKay, Hughes, and Thurman are modernist innovations, and the Harlem Renaissance is a modernist cultural formation. The problem was the specific version of modernism elevated — the white male expatriate high modernism of Eliot, Pound, and Joyce — at the expense of Black modernism, proletarian or liberatory socialist modernism, and feminist modernism developing simultaneously. T.S. Eliot’s modernism required the gutting of personality and politics as the price of aesthetic seriousness. McKay’s modernism kept both. One modernism was canonized, and the other was suppressed, not by different forces for different reasons but by the same ideology working from opposite ends simultaneously. In any case, much of high modernism is Victorianism shorn of its panoramic social vision. The psychological focus was already there in Victorian fiction, the stream of consciousness a technical intensification of what Eliot and Hardy and Hugo were already doing, modernism’s vaunted interiority less a revolution than a narrowing, the social world contracted to the dimensions of the sensitized individual consciousness and called an advance.

Modernism did not invent psychological interiority. It narrowed it and intensified it, gutting social vision and elevating consciousness as the sole or primary subject. It’s narrow formalism, a fractal exercise. The modernist restriction to pure interiority, Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Joyce’s Ulysses, the stream of consciousness as the novel’s highest achievement, is preposterously claimed to make the collective social vision of the suppressed tradition look formally retrograde. If the Victorian novel had been allowed to remain the standard rather than be forcibly superseded by the modernist restriction, then Michael Gold’s collective portrait and Agnes Smedley’s panoramic sweep would look not like formal limitations but like continuations of the greatest tradition in the novel, which is what they actually are.

The canonical construction of modernism as an advance over Victorian fiction served the same ideological function as the New Critical formalism. It installed a standard that systematically disadvantaged political seriousness, social panorama, and collective consciousness as literary values, while presenting the narrowing as aesthetic progress, and progress in general. George Eliot’s Middlemarch does everything the modernists claimed to do and everything the suppressed tradition was doing simultaneously — psychological depth, social panorama, political seriousness, formal sophistication. Middlemarch is harder to aestheticize and depoliticize than Mrs Dalloway because it does not give up the social world for the inner one.

Because high modernism and New Criticism are so self-limiting in scope, and because the most moving revealing novels of the dispossessed, the most vital social novels, were crushed out of society, and because in overlapping fashion multicultural literature continued to be suppressed or siloed, a desperate and gutted literary culture turned to postmodernism for badly needed scope, but within imperial restrictions. So postmodernism dissolved political content, though it appeared to be everywhere, through the instability of reference and the suspicion of master narratives, such that you cannot read, say, Gold’s Jews Without Money as a political argument about immigrant poverty because postmodernism will tell you the text deconstructs its own claims to referential meaning.

Now metamodernism, the most recent iteration of suppression ideology, restores affect, some real feeling and meaning, without restoring structural political analysis. So you get sincerity about personal experience and feeling without partisan politics. Much remains destabilized. You get the emotional tenor of the suppressed tradition without the political content that gives the feelings meaning and direction. The more things appear to change in the establishment, the less actually does. The pathetic febrile hand-wringing of Henry James, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, Hemingway, Roth, Bellow, Mailer, Updike, DeLillo, Pynchon, Franzen, David Foster Wallace and the whole lot, canonized, acclaimed, modeled, just doesn’t suffice.

The people’s suppressed liberatory tradition in each generation spurns this gutting of consciousness, and it always has, from the Civil War to the present day, which is why it has always been suppressed by the various forces of empire. The establishment canon, by contrast, has enshrined the propertied entitled consciousness all the way from Jamesian aestheticism through T.S. Eliot’s and the New Critics’ social vacuity, through postmodernism’s denial of stable meaning, to today’s metamodern pretense of political engagement that dissolves into the same essential vacuity. The multicultural revolution ameliorated the most retrograde white male supremacist lines in the production of literature — a real and necessary achievement — but the explicit contemporary class politics, the contemporary anti-imperialist and anti-war consciousness, the contemporary revolutionary structural engagement that powered and animated the suppressed tradition at its most vital — from Smedley’s prosecutorial penetration and rage to McKay’s pan-African internationalism to Gold’s collective working-class anatomy — remain as gutted, as marginal, and as taboo as they were when the Red Scares and Cold War first buried them.

This means that the multicultural revolution, for all its vital and necessary achievements, has so far largely succeeded in diversifying the faces of the sensitive privileged consciousness without fundamentally challenging the canonical tradition’s deepest commitment. And so it too often keeps the imperial consciousness — now diversified — preeminent, individualistic, and politically safe, gutted of the fuller revolutionary apprehension that would make it fully conscious and fully revealing, and therefore far more insightful and experiential, far more moving and inspiring, far more useful and real. Far more human, liberatory, revolutionary. Far more awake, and badly needed, in this contemporary time of blatant genocide and omnicide.

The same forces that buried the suppressed novelists also destroyed Charlie Chaplin, the most beloved filmmaker in the world. He was effectively exiled in 1952 by the FBI, HUAC, and Red Scare forces for doing in film what Gold and Smedley and McKay did in the novel. He focused on dispossessed consciousness, basically explained the system as criminal, flouted the establishment’s view, and both challenged and surpassed the constricting and dehumanizing conditions of establishment art and life.

Chaplin’s defining figure, the Little Tramp, is a homeless, penniless, perpetually hungry man navigating a world of wealth and authority that has no place for him. He exists below the ladder rather than on it, and the comedy is always structural and pointed. His humanity collides with institutions that grind people up. In Modern Times, the factory does not merely employ and beat down the Tramp, it literally swallows him into its machinery. The would-be lethal visual joke is a wholly condemning political argument.

Chaplin’s own origins matter here. Born into extreme poverty in London, with a mother who was institutionalized and a childhood partly spent in workhouses, he was not observing deprivation from above but writing from inside the material. In that sense, the Tramp is autobiographical much as Daughter of Earth is autobiographical. The consciousness is shaped by the conditions it depicts. The tradition is the same tradition expressed through a different form, as with Hughes’s blues poetry against the entitled remoteness of Eliot, as with the people’s liberatory “radical” press against the institutional literary quarterlies the CIA was busy funding. Money so often limits consciousness and culture, and is used by the imperial establishment purposefully to do so, rather than to expand and improve it. The CIA funding of the Kenyon Review while Chaplin was being exiled is one instance among countless of the empire using money as cultural and political weapon, funding what serves it, defunding what threatens it. Much badly needed people’s liberatory culture is dead for lack of money, or for being unable to compete with endless imperial financial forces and reserves.

Chaplin’s films repeatedly stage the antagonism between the dispossessed and institutional power, of the militant capitalist empire against the people. The Kid is about poverty and the state mechanisms that separate poor families. City Lights is about class, with the Tramp performing acts of grace for a blind flower girl who cannot see that he is penniless. The Gold Rush turns hunger and precarity into comedy without softening the material force and implications. The Great Dictator makes explicit what had long been implicit: that fascism is not an aberration from the world of the Tramp but its political culmination. Today, the Trump regime is neofascist. Police state capitalism itself, whether liberal, conservative, or worse is neofascist and has been for more than a century. Chaplin’s Modern Times was made in 1936, the same year as The Surrounded and Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, the dispossessed tradition expressing itself simultaneously across novel and film, as it had for decades.

Chaplin’s exile is not incidental biography. It’s proof of imperial cultural suppression and domination. In September 1952, while sailing to England for the European premiere of Limelight, Chaplin learned that the U.S. government intended to detain him for a hearing if he sought to return. After thirty-eight years in the United States, he was effectively forced out through a coordinated campaign of harassment and character assassination by the FBI, immigration authorities, the Justice Department, and the right-wing press. His offense was not simply personal scandal or nonconformity but a body of work that persistently humanized the poor, mocked authority, and rendered capitalism and fascism visible as systems of organized violence.

Chaplin’s case is the clearest cinematic analogue to what happened to Gold and Smedley and McKay and Hughes and others. The same corporate-state order that buried the Big Bang novelists and silenced the radical press and distorted consciousness and understanding also moved against a cultural figure of global stature when his art became too politically potent to be allowed to continue. The Hollywood blacklist destroyed careers and imprisoned writers, but Chaplin’s exile is its most extreme single instance — not merely the denial of work or the threat of imprisonment but the physical expulsion of the most beloved mass artist in the world from the country whose dispossessed he had spent his career humanizing. The empire is ruthless in its hegemony of mind and matter. And it will destroy the world before it voluntarily surrenders power. Power and force rule — whether intellectual and artistic, political and psychological, or physical and material. Chaplin knew this. So did Gold and Smedley and McKay. So did the people they wrote for and about.

Unconsciously or otherwise it can seem that the reason the paragons of the establishment, the quintessential stuffed suits, Henry James and T.S. Eliot, left America before and during the socialist era was to get as far away as conceivable from the great writers of the dispossessed who were creating the greatest American literature.

Many of the dispossessed writers went abroad too, for very different reasons. Gold fled to Mexico to avoid getting drafted into the imperial butchery of World War One. Before being pushed into exile in 1949, Agnes Smedley moved overseas to Europe, to the Soviet Union, and to China, but into people’s revolutions and anti-colonial struggles rather than into European aristocratic culture and Anglican conservatism. She followed her revolutionary consciousness across geography because the same class war she was born into on the Missouri countryside and western mining camps was being fought on multiple continents, and she went where the fight was.

Later dispossessed writers like Richard Wright left for Paris in 1947 and never returned, the FBI surveillance and American racism having made life in America impossible. James Baldwin left America for France and Turkey. Chester Himes followed in 1953, not to inhabit a more refined tradition but because America was trying to destroy them all, because racism and the Red Scare and the FBI made life in America intolerable or impossible.

The canonical emigres chose Europe. The suppressed writers were driven out of America or followed the revolutionary struggle beyond its borders. Same geography in some cases, entirely opposite circumstances, entirely opposite meaning. James found elite and rarified England. Smedley found the Chinese revolution. McKay in 1922 and Hughes in 1932 found the Russian revolution and the Soviet Union. Baldwin found that Paris was the only place he could breathe. He told Dick Cavett,

The years I lived in Paris did one thing for me—they released me from that particular social terror which is not the paranoia of my own mind but a real social danger visible in the face of every cop, every boss, everybody.

Meanwhile, Henry James

told of his excitement on finding in England, during his trip of 1869, a social order “in which everyone wasn’t hurled straight, with the momentum of rising, upon an office or a store.”

And in a letter to his sister:

Dearest Alice, I could come back to America (could be carried back on a stretcher) to die—but never, never to live.

Claude McKay went abroad as the most various of writers and individuals. He left America in 1922, partly fleeing American racism, partly drawn by the revolutionary possibilities of the moment, and spent the next twelve years moving across England, the Soviet Union, France, Spain, and Morocco before returning to America in 1934. He attended the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in Moscow in 1922, was celebrated there as a symbol of Black American radicalism, spoke before thousands, and was received with a warmth that American literary culture never offered him. He found in the Soviet Union a society that treated him as a full human being in ways the United States had not and would not.1 But McKay was constitutionally unable to be anyone’s symbol or party member for long. He drifted from Moscow to Paris to Marseille to Barcelona to Tangier, living in working class and bohemian poverty, working service jobs when necessary, writing continuously. The Mediterranean Marseille waterfront of Banjo came directly from this time, the pan-African diasporic community of sailors, drifters, and port workers that the novel features is the community McKay lived in and among. He wasn’t observing from outside. He was inside it, which is why the novel has the authority it does.

The years in Morocco were particularly significant, living among Arab and Berber populations, seeing colonialism from inside the colonized world rather than from inside the colonizing one, deepening the internationalist anti-colonial consciousness that makes Banjo formally and politically unique among American novels of its moment. McKay went abroad the way Smedley did, following conscience and the people’s consciousness rather than escaping into elite and rarified refinement, living the material rather than aestheticizing it from a safe distance. James found the [with]drawing rooms2 of England. Eliot found the Anglican church.

McKay returned to America in 1934, coming back poor, ill, and increasingly marginalized. The Harlem Renaissance had peaked, the proletarian movement was under severe pressure and repression, and McKay fit comfortably into neither camp. His new novels in the 1930s were rejected by publishers who found them politically untouchable. Three novels would not be published until decades after his death. He died in 1948 in Chicago, largely forgotten by the literary establishment that should have recognized him as one of the greatest novelists of the century. In 1932, Langston Hughes enthusiastically visited the Soviet Union ten years after McKay and was then made to pay dearly for his Depression-era support of Communist causes during the Cold War, even though he never seems to have joined the Communist Party. The life differences between the propertied writers and the dispossessed writers tells you much about what America’s entitled and suppressed literary conditions are and what America does to each. It shows what America actually is. It’s rhetorically and marginally democratic and civil rights based, while fundamentally tyrannical in structure and ideology. It’s elite capital rights based — a democracy in rhetoric, a bigoted plutocracy in effect. The entitled propertied and plutocratic tradition in America has its canonized truncated, disemboweled, lobotomized art and literature, and the democratic and dispossessed tradition has the much more human and much greater art and literature. The people’s liberatory art is the much more politically, psychologically, and socially vital art and literature — terribly disfigured and suppressed by the hegemonic forces of empire that remain rampant today.

What unites the canonical line of six — James, Wharton, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Wolfe, and Faulkner — championed by Maxwell Perkins and the publishing industry, New Criticism, Lionel Trilling, and the whole state-capitalist establishment, and enforced by the Red Scares, professional blacklists, McCarthyism, oppressive Hot and Cold War legislation and attacks, COINTELPRO, and so on to the present day — is the sensitive perceiving consciousness of the privileged entitled, individual and class. The camera of consciousness is trained on what the system costs its privileged members, and very rarely emphasizes what it demands and takes from those below them.

This is the master key to the entire canonical tradition and to understanding what the suppressed tradition did differently and better. The canonical novel treats relatively privileged suffering as tragedy, somewhat accidental or incidental, as if the bigoted state-capitalist system could in principle be redeemed if it were kinder to its sensitive protagonists. Meanwhile, the suppressed dispossessed people’s novels comprehend the suffering of the vast populace as plain evidence, structural evidence — meaning that the suffering is not a malfunction or unfortunate feature but the proof of what the system is for and whom it was built against. The canonical novel locates the problem in the gaps between the system’s ideals and its practice. The suppressed novels show the lines of the system as fundamentally criminal, the money rule, the white supremacy, the capital-first profiteering, these inhuman and inhumane pillars of society, the bigoted plutocracy.

In the propertied, entitled, establishment canonical novel the sensitive consciousness is the measure of all things. The system is judged by what it costs the sensitive privileged elite protagonists, their individual struggles as shown through entitled consciousness. In the people’s dispossessed and suppressed novels the community, the class, the people are the measure. The populist struggle is shown through dispossessed and liberatory consciousnesses. The system is judged by what it costs and takes from the dispossessed rather than by what it costs the privileged, whose limitations, whether chosen or inherited, are the artificial constraints of entitlement rather than the imposed conditions of dispossession.

In Claude McKay’s vibrant novel Home to Harlem, the system’s illegitimacy is the premise. The consciousnesses of the dispossessed are primary. In Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money, the poverty isn’t a backdrop for a sensitive consciousness to suffer against. It’s the subject, the social condemnation, the largest point, the highest consciousness of the novel. In Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth, the violence done to wrecked and impoverished women by property relations and basic chauvinist norms is structural and foregrounded, dramatized and discoursed explicitly through great personal immediacy and analysis, never remote, never mystic or vague.

In Home to Harlem the system’s illegitimacy is structural and constant.3 Jake’s labor on the railroad, the Harlem rent economy, the sexual economy, all of it is portrayed as a system painfully extracting value from the people, Black people. But crucially McKay doesn’t make Jake a hapless victim. Jake has joy, appetite, agency. The indictment is in the material conditions, not in a hapless consciousness or in a privileged consciousness. Jake is no privileged victim. He is victimized, as is much of his world, the undeniable systemic truth. Ray provides an intellectual counterpoint to Jake in the novel, but McKay doesn’t privilege Ray’s consciousness over Jake’s. That content and positioning makes for part of the formal strength of Home to Harlem. The system is illegitimate and the people it exploits are fully human regardless. Banjo pushes farther. The beach people of Marseille, the international Black diaspora living in the economic margins of European port life. The American Dream’s unavailability is shown as structural fact in Home to Harlem. Jake doesn’t have access to upward mobility, property, respectability, or middle class mythology not because he has consciously rejected them on political grounds but because the system has made them materially unavailable to him and to everyone in his world. The rejection and denial of the American Dream is partly chosen and partly imposed, and McKay doesn’t fully separate the two. Jake’s joy in the face of that unavailability is a form of resistance that is lived rather than wholly explained, the only available mode of being in a world that has foreclosed the alternatives. In Banjo, McKay is more explicit about the philosophical and class, cultural and imperial realities and possibilities of the people. The imperial system is directly exposed in discourse as well as dramatized, and revolutionary possibilities are directly discussed.

In Wallace Thurman’s driving novel The Blacker the Berry, Emma Lou’s torment is produced by a specific named and explained system — anti-Black colorism operating within the Black community as an internalized function of white supremacy. Thurman does something more structurally involved than Wharton attempts. He shows how the system reproduces itself inside its victims. That’s not the system being cruel to a sensitive entitled person. That’s a dramatic revelation and analysis of how ideological domination works at the psychological and social level. Gramsci would recognize it as the reality and the work of an anti-hegemonic organic intellectual and artist.

In Langston Hughes’ warm novel Not Without Laughter, the economic pressure is never backdrop. Sandy’s grandmother’s labor, his mother’s choices, his aunt Harriett’s dismissal of respectability are all dramatized as responses to a specific economic and racial system whose illegitimacy is the premise of every page. Hughes creates working class Black life in Kansas as fully novelistic with complete interiority and dignity. That’s the act of legitimation that the canonical writers rarely if ever perform for their working class characters.

In D’Arcy McNickle’s rough and tumble novel The Surrounded, Archilde’s trap is not personal, not temperamental, not the cruelty of one social world to a sensitive entitled member. It’s a specific historical crime, the dispossession of the Salish people, the reservation system, the destruction of a culture by ongoing colonial conquest. The system is criminal, legally and morally. McNickle shows it in hard-hitting dramatic prose without melodrama and without any colonial gaze, akin to Frederick Douglass’ novel The Heroic Slave, though far more psychologically elaborated. The coherence and existence of the Native world is what white empire ruthlessly destroys. McNickle illuminates the effect of white empire with potent drama all the way through to its savage end. The inherent dignity and gravity, liveliness and vitality of these anti-hegemonic people’s novels of the dispossessed and oppressed is where can be found the true greatness and full life and most sweeping consciousnesses of American literature and culture — often very far outside the establishment canon.

In Nella Larsen’s Passing, Irene and Clare are not victims of the system’s cruelty to sensitive members. They navigate a system of racial policing that has defined their existence as a problem to be managed with violence, that has made their skin, bodies, and mind into a battleground, that has weaponized psychology around the color line. Clare’s passing is a survival strategy, not an entitled transgression, in response to structural illegitimacy. The ending, ambiguous as it is, indicates the extent to which the problem cannot be resolved within the racist structures of the society. Larsen shows this with a psychological deftness that equals or surpasses any novel of manners or psychology, except the manners and psychology here are those closer to basic survival rather than entitled aspiration.

The pattern across all these liberatory suppressed people’s novels of the dispossessed is consistent and it’s the inverse of the canonical pattern. The society is shown as illegitimate. The people it oppresses have full interiority and dignity, and there is no individual escape into sensitivity or code or aesthetic experience that resolves the structural problem — the economic, social, and political problem. These novels show a full human consciousness of life in America. That’s not a mere different sensibility from the canonical writers. It’s a sweeping categorical difference that is fundamentally greater. It’s a far more full and honest account of consciousness, and of what America and life actually are.

In the canonical novel the system fails its supposed finest individuals. In the suppressed novels the system works as designed, and the design is the crime. That’s a telling binary of the canonical versus the suppressed literature and people, of two entirely different understandings and valuations of what American literature and life are for: 1) attending to the humanity and potential of the dispossessed by illuminating full consciousness, reality, and possibility, or 2) cementing in place with maybe a touch of reform the narrow and warped consciousness of entitled privilege and lethal plutocracy.

It may sound insulting to say what follows but it is telling and accurate, and hard things sometimes need to be said directly. The canonical writers are defined by their relationship to privilege — how they inhabit it, perform it, retreat into it, or are consumed by it — and that’s a severe limitation for depicting full consciousness, reality, and possibility. Hemingway performs a truncated reportorial banality or stoicism in service of a brand. Faulkner performs tragedy and melodrama in service of a lost order based on slavery that he never honestly examined, maybe never could, maybe never understood or was willing to. Regardless, it’s a huge objective and normative shortcoming that the great suppressed novelists of the time did not have. Fitzgerald performs privileged glamour and youth and longing in service of a class that he was both part of and that would not fully have him. James performs interminable ostensible sensitivity in an absurdly insulated world. Wharton casts her eye about the gilded cage she lived in, often adroitly so, which may be fine for the rich and rich-associate, but what about everyone else — the ninety-nine percent? Wolfe performs would-be genius in service of himself. They are all, in their own way, writers of the established, entitled elite — an ultimately small if privileged dominant order — and that includes Faulkner who dramatized Harvard-going former slave-owning families and Confederate officers. These are writers whose work was conditioned and tamed by the world that petted, rewarded, canonized it.

More directly — Malcolm Cowley was apparently a decent man but a cultural vacillator who helped canonize white supremacist Faulkner. Ernest Hemingway was an establishment careerist who told Mike Gold to go fuck himself for criticizing Hemingway’s seeming stance on fascists in For Whom the Bell Tolls. William Faulkner was a white supremacist who said publicly he would rather “shoot down Negroes in the street” than enforce their civil rights. His formal complexity and his personal racism are not separate things. They are the same position expressed in different forms. F. Scott Fitzgerald was an elite wannabe who romanticized a class that consumed him. Henry James was a dithering plutocrat whose tedious convolutions and sprawls of sentences perform the leisure they describe. Thomas Wolfe was a pretentious rhapsodic void. Edith Wharton was a gilded cage decorator, sharp enough to see the bars, unwilling to look beyond them. At least she could really handle a sentence, as could Fitzgerald, and she may have outstripped him in The House of Mirth two decades ahead of The Great Gatsby.

Any compliments aside, does this seem insulting? It’s the argument restated in an alternate and direct form. The canonical writers safe in their privilege lacked fundamental vitality and social honesty and clarity as a result. They were aesthetically ambitious enough to seem serious, and they were politically banal, or retrograde, to pose no threat to the established order of thought and society, economics and politics, or to that of literature itself. The excluded writers whose work was most alive, most revelatory, and most imperative were dangerous to what imperial America is and does to people, in being encouraging and helpful, inspiring and illuminating to the people, dispossessed and oppressed as they were and remain. Privilege in, privileged consciousness out. Empire rewarded its own sanitized reflection and punished everything that declined to reflect it back.

The uncanonical writers are defined by their relationship to struggle, not struggle at a distance, or as a safe, or circumscribed theme, or as a built parallel world, or as vague or tenuous atmosphere, but as the basic condition and potential of their lives and of the lives of the people they wrote about and for. The dispossessed novelists did not observe struggle from a position of safety. They were inside it. Smedley was struggle itself. So was Gold. McKay lived it across three continents. Hughes carried it with grace and love. Thurman never softened it. Larsen’s writing life was destroyed by it. McNickle wrote from the oldest and deepest struggle of all on the continent.

Agnes Smedley was ungovernable. She belonged to no one and fought for everyone. Michael Gold was working class gold. Claude McKay was the people’s wandering world citizen. Langston Hughes was all heart and humanity. Wallace Thurman took shit from no one. Nella Larsen saw everything and was given nothing. D’Arcy McNickle expressed the original vision and true grit of the Salish people who would not be vanquished. These greatest literary artists expressed the most sweeping and imperative human and social consciousnesses.

The American literary canon has not only been unjust to these writers. It has actively crippled American literature and humanity. The canon’s gatekeepers did not only harm McKay, Hughes, Larsen, Smedley, Gold, Thurman, and McNickle. They impoverished the American and world public and every subsequent American writer who was handed a diminished and distorted map of what American literature, thought, and society was and could be. American literature as an ongoing productive enterprise has been stunted and warped, perverted and destroyed because its practitioners were trained on a fake dehumanized canon that excised its most conscious and most experiential voices, its most penetrating and comprehensive practitioners and visionaries. The canon did not protect American literature from inferior writers. It protected American literature from itself — from its own most fully human capacities, which happen to be liberatory, left, socialist, anti-capitalist, anti-empire, and therefore relentlessly assailed.

That’s what makes the fake canon of the violent plutocrat establishment hegemonic rather than merely exclusionary. Hegemony naturalizes the suppression until the diminished version feels complete or superior and people eventually consent or succumb unwittingly to their own conquest, thinking they are full and free and enlightened in thought and action, while helping perpetuate the suffocated and lobotomized consciousness and perception. The American literary canon has been mentally cleansed of its greatest humanity. It’s a zombie, a walking corpse. A prize-winning, sanctified, heralded zombie — a zombified literature and art. And the criticism too. Imperial establishment criticism may be the worst part of it. It’s what gets taught and believed and reproduced by the establishment and is considered great. The great zombie.

The American literary canon in its art and criticism is so very ironically unknowing, often willfully unknowing, imperially manufactured, living its publisher-approved, critically lauded, award-winning zombie half-life. As the kids say, it’s creepy as fuck. What was lost in the suppression is not merely injustice to excluded writers. What was lost was a better world, better consciousness, better possibility, more truthful reality. What was imposed by the establishment canon is a gutted and distorted picture of what human and American life and literature actually was and is — its range, its energy, its formal and moral possibilities, its depth and emotional impact, its fullest psychology and sociology, and its fullest human experiences. A literature student trained on the standard canon comes away thinking American fiction is fundamentally about entitled and privileged and propertied individual consciousness, of some mannered style, worlds of sheer ambiguities and alienated selves, or utterly bleak and hopeless with no fully liberatory worlds and consciousnesses visible. They can sense the zombification. They see and feel the walking death. It’s in a sense suicidal. What they don’t encounter is the rich, vital, formally sophisticated tradition of novels engaging class and labor, race and gender, empire and ideology, liberation and collective struggle — full and vital human consciousness and experience. Nor can they understand by reading the canon that the fullest, greatest, most vital, most revealing tradition in American literature was deliberately buried and systematically taught against.

What was lost was the knowledge of what it feels like, and thinks-like, to be dispossessed and yet liberatory in your own land, not as sociology, not as statistics, but as life experience portrayed with full artistic force and liberatory consciousness. Gold’s Lower East Side survival drama. Smedley’s Ozark and Rocky Mountain poverty and resistance. McKay’s diasporic homelessness and liberatory views. Hughes’s Black American tenderness and endurance. Thurman’s unsparing account of what colorism does to a people already under racial siege and how they might stand against it. Larsen’s psychological focus on what it costs to navigate a racist, classist world that does not care for you and how to hang on regardless. McNickle’s testimony of survival against extinction.

What was lost was the writers and the lives, the mind and hearts that were doubly dispossessed and suppressed, first in life then in literature — Larsen’s silence, Thurman’s early death, Smedley’s exile, McKay’s poverty and neglect, Hughes’s near-criminalization, Gold’s erasure and vilification. Manuscripts were disappeared, careers were broken, novels were never written because the people who would have written them were destroyed first, or the publishers who would have published them said no, or the society that would have helped create them and read them was intellectually, aesthetically, and normatively murdered — systematically.

McKay’s Home to Harlem and Banjo being treated as curiosities rather than as foundational texts is a loss to civilization. It means the novel of Black working class urban life had to be reinvented repeatedly rather than developed continuously. It means entire classes, kinds, and realities of people are disappeared, while the entitled reflection of the mad and pillaging culture is celebrated.

What was lost ultimately was the America that might have been, had its literature been allowed to tell it the truth about itself. What happened in American literature and continues to happen across its novels, poetry, plays, videos, and criticism is a kind of slow motion literary genocide and enslavement, a zombie world of half literature and half lives. Any liberatory recovery has been marginal, halting, and fiercely opposed.

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The Surrounded (1936) — D’Arcy McNickle

D’Arcy McNickle published his first novel in 1936 when he was thirty-two. The Surrounded is a powerful and revealing novel that should be canonical in any honest and meaningful account of American literature. D’Arcy McNickle was a Salish-Kootenai tribal member writing from inside the onerous weight of federal assimilation policy, the allotment system, the Catholic mission school conquest, and the destruction of Native land. The “surround” isn’t metaphorical. It’s the drama and discourse of the novel, and the history of American imperial policy expressed through a specific people on a specific landscape, explored through a consciousness that cannot escape it because there is no outside to escape to. The Surrounded is no regional or ethnic novel in the dismissive sense the establishment uses those categories. It’s a dramatic structural account of what American empire does to the people it surrounds, which is more than Hemingway or Faulkner or Wolfe ever attempted or could have.

The fact that The Surrounded is known primarily within Native American literary studies rather than as a central American novel is outrageous. The canonical tradition cannot include The Surrounded in the first rank because doing so would require acknowledging that the American nation-building project that the canonical tradition largely celebrates or elegizes is the same process McNickle documents as destruction. Faulkner can be canonical because his critique of the South is internal to the white Southern tradition. McNickle cannot be canonical because his critique is of the American nation building project from the position of those it destroyed. Why isn’t McNickle mentioned in the same breath with Hemingway, The Surrounded with A Farewell to Arms?

The Surrounded is a Salish standoff against empire and its guns. This is the most real “Western” as novel that you will ever read, a story of imperialism. The novel is set in the Sniél-emen Valley, which translates as “Mountains of the Surrounded,” on the Flathead Reservation in Montana. Archilde Leon, half Salish and half Spanish, returns from Portland, where he worked as a fiddler, to visit his mother Catherine LaLoup, a Salish woman increasingly returning to traditional ways, and his father Max Leon, a Spaniard. Archilde interacts with an elder, Modeste, who teaches him Salish history all the while the plot and frame of the story is Salish economic dispossession leading to the theft of horses, causing capitalist-state assault, leading to murder, more assault, more murder and the transition from informal captivity and dispossession on the Reservation to formal incarceration, a systemic violence that is still ongoing, not least through the massive American prison system, increasingly for profit.

Reviewer and Native novelist and scholar Louis Owens claimed that this novel led to an Indigenous literary movement more notable than the Harlem Renaissance. The colonial structure of empire surrounded the Salish people on every side, involving the 1887 Dawes Act’s land allotment system, the boarding schools, and the Catholic Church all of which stripped land, culture, and property from the original inhabitants while intensifying the reservation confinement, in a racist legal system. Archilde’s trap is far more than personal tragedy, it’s structural, and he steps directly into it when he returns and re-involves himself with his family and community.

This societal trap is not individual or temperamental, or the cruelty of a social world to a sensitive member. It’s a specific historical crime, the dispossession of the Salish people, the reservation system, the destruction of a culture by the assault of empire. The system isn’t just illegitimate or problematic, it’s criminal, legally and morally. McNickle shows this dramatically and without any colonial gaze. The Native world is coherent, if troubled, and valid if tenuous, and white empire is designed to destroy it as completely as possible. The world and characters are vivid. It’s such a gritty and good, inviting and impactful people’s read, especially as compared to the establishment stalwarts The Sound and the Fury, A Farewell to Arms, and Look Homeward, Angel, which all feel stiff and stilted, put on and a bit fake, and more, by comparison.

McNickle was born on the Flathead Nation of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. Within months of his birth, Congress passed legislation to survey and allot the reservation, with surplus lands put up for sale and non-Indigenous people taking possession of the most fertile land. His mother Philomene Parenteau was French Cree Métis, while his father William James McNickle was Irish. His mother and her children were adopted into the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. His Métis grandparents had fled the Red River settlement in Manitoba, first for Saskatchewan then for the Flathead Reservation following the 1885 Riel Rebellion.

McNickle attended the Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Oregon before entering the University of Montana in 1921. In 1924 he sold his land allotment to attend Oxford in 1925-26, returning to America without finishing his degree. He worked with the Works Progress Administration in 1935 and with the Office of Indian Affairs in 1936, the same year The Surrounded was published. He cofounded the National Congress of American Indians in 1944 and spent his career as a writer, activist, anthropologist, and government administrator. The Surrounded was republished in 1978 after being out of print for forty years and being nearly unknown even in the academic world. The novel’s dismissal is one of the great scandals of American literary history, one of many.

The opening of The Surrounded:

Archilde Leon had been away from his father’s ranch for nearly a year, yet when he left the stage road and began the half-mile walk to the house he did not hurry. When he emerged from behind a clump of thornbush and cottonwood and caught his first glimpse of the cluster of buildings before him, he looked once, and that was all.

He avoided the front of the big house, where his father would most likely be sitting, and made for the dirt-roofed log cabin which occupied lower ground, down toward the creek. Two dogs, one yellow and one black and white, leaped and howled, but they were the only ones to meet him.

He walked past the big house, which was his father’s and went to the cabin, his mother’s. There she was, as he knew she would be, sitting in the shade. If she heard him she did not look up at once. But she was a little deaf and a little blind—perhaps she had not sensed his approach. He let the heavy suitcase slip from his sweating hand.

Then she looked up. A sigh escaped her and a quick smile multiplied the many fine lines in her wrinkled brown face.

Here he was, the best of her sons, and the youngest, home again after a year—but would he stay? She had only a faint idea of where he had been; the world out that way was so unlike Sniél-eman; she had even less of an idea of what he did when he went away. But never mind. Here he was again. She smiled quickly, a little at a distance; she did not wish to embarrass him with her attention.

Upton Sinclair is a prominent precursor and companion to the Big Bang tradition and one of the most illuminating borderline cases before Steinbeck. Sinclair was a writer who spent thirty years producing explicit structural indictments of American capitalism in novels from a position of socialist conviction, whose work anticipates the Big Bang tradition in political consciousness and investigative proximity to the material but who falls far short of its fullest achievement in a way that is worth understanding.

Sinclair did not observe the dispossessed from above. He embedded himself in the meatpacking plants of Chicago, in the Colorado coal mines, in the California oil fields, doing the research that produced The Jungle (1906), King Coal (1917), and Oil! (1927) with a degree of direct contact with the material that most civic establishment writers never approached. He was a committed socialist from his early twenties, ran for office multiple times on socialist platforms, was surveilled by the FBI, and had his work banned and suppressed. Oil! was banned in Boston, and The Jungle generated death threats from the meatpacking industry. The mechanisms of suppression that buried the Big Bang tradition moved against Sinclair decades earlier and less completely, before the threat that the Mexican and Russian revolutions posed to capitalist order triggered the comprehensive Red Scares and Cold War anti-socialist attacks and institutional formations that would bury the Big Bang tradition wholesale.

To understand Sinclair’s artistic — aesthetic and normative — accomplishment and position, Gramsci’s framework needs to be pushed beyond the binary of organic dispossessed versus civic establishment. There are at least three positions. First, the organic dispossessed position — Gold, Smedley, McKay, Hughes — writing from inside the dispossession with the full authority of their organic position. Second, the counter-hegemonic committed intellectual position — Hugo and Sinclair and to a lesser extent Dreiser — writing from outside the organic dispossessed position but explicitly exposing, dramatizing and explaining the system as criminal and demanding its transformation with political commitment and close understanding and expression of the material situation. And third, the civic establishment tradition — Steinbeck, Cather, Wharton, Anderson — writing with some sympathy and social awareness from the establishment position, showing suffering without explaining society and culture as criminal, observing without the counter-hegemonic commitment.

Sinclair belongs to the second category not the third. He is counter-hegemonic like Hugo. Both wrote from outside the organic dispossessed position. Hugo wrote as a wealthy celebrated establishment figure who created for liberation of the persecuted and dispossessed with conviction and conscience, and Sinclair wrote as a middle class intellectual who did the same. Both explicitly dramatized and exposed society, culture, and consciousness as criminal. Both demanded transformation explicitly and directly. The difference — and it is huge — between Sinclair and Hugo is formal and qualitative rather than positional. Hugo achieves the full marriage of human consciousness and social indictment that Sinclair does not, trusting human consciousness as the primary medium in the way the Big Bang writers do. He shows the fates of people dramatized through their consciousness revealing the social structure rather than the social structure illustrated through an external look at people. Sinclair does the right thing in the wrong sequence even within the counter-hegemonic position.

So what separates Sinclair from the Big Bang novelists, the suppressed dispossessed, is formal, positional, and qualitative not political. Whereas the dispossessed writers express human consciousness while revealing society, Sinclair reveals society while expressing human consciousness. The order of emphasis and operation is the difference. It’s more of a looking at than a looking from within. In The Jungle, Jurgis Rudkus is the figure by which class oppression in the meatpacking industry is exposed. The human consciousness is genuine and felt but secondary to the investigative purpose — more observed and explained from the surface than engaged and expressed from within. The novel is journalism with novelistic flesh on it, the muckraking impulse primary, the human interiority in service of the exposure rather than the exposure arriving through the fullness of the interiority. Sinclair trusts the system’s criminality as his subject. He doesn’t fully trust the human consciousness in that system as his primary medium. The Big Bang writers do, and that trust is the difference between the counter-hegemonic tradition at its fullest and the counter-hegemonic tradition at a committed but formally preliminary stage.

This is not a failure of political commitment. Sinclair’s politics were as explicit and as radical as Gold’s or Smedley’s and were sustained across a much longer life and career. It’s a formal, positional, and qualitative limitation, a limitation of consciousness. The sympathy is genuine and the writing is illuminating and instructive, but the organic position is approximated rather than wholly lived and complete. The prose reflects this in being uneven and often tedious, dully descriptive, the sentences serving the argument rather than inseparable from it, expressing it. Sinclair was not the most formally accomplished practitioner of what he was doing, but he was doing it, thirty years before the white male civic dispossessed writers of the 1930s, writing explicit socialist structural exposures of American capitalism at novel length when the canonical establishment was producing little of the kind. At their best in their novels, Dreiser, Norris, and Anderson were doing somewhat similar, somewhat more accomplished work, except in being less counterhegemonic. The aesthetic and normative, psychological and social consummation of the American novel would need to wait for the Big Bang. Theodore Dreiser’s novels at their best have a somewhat closer organic position, a more intimate consciousness, while Frank Norris showed systemic damage with naturalist style from more of an observational distance, and Sherwood Anderson’s best novel explorations in Marching Men and Poor White are an impressive but sprawling and confused, incomplete and disoriented mix of the social and the psychological. Anderson in his novels has more human feeling and perception than Dreiser and Norris and Sinclair, while Sinclair has more political weight and focus. There is otherwise great overlap between these four naturalists with Sinclair standing out due to his greater political commitment and Anderson standing out due to his more penetrating focus on the human psyche. Dreiser and Norris are more reportorial sketch artists. All lack the dramatic sense of Wharton, just as Wharton lacks the sweeping social consciousness of the naturalists and the holistic human and social consciousness of the great novelists of the dispossessed who flourished so powerfully and briefly in the late 1920s and 1930s — Gold, Smedley, McKay, Hughes, Larsen, Thurman, Tsiang, and McNickle.

Sinclair’s most well known novel The Jungle is a concentrated, dense novel of immigrant working class Chicago focused on the criminality of the meatpacking industry that is more journalistic investigative than novelistic in consciousness. Sinclair writes more as a lab clinician rather than as a purveyor of human intuition and private and public consciousness. The novel shows working class destruction by way of wage theft and seasonal layoffs, injury and death without compensation due to chemical exposure and systemic accidents, sexual coercion, child labor, housing fraud, vote buying and political corruption. The novel ends after a somewhat successful municipal election cycle for the socialists with the socialist chant, “Chicago will be ours!” The “ours” of that final chant names a collective consciousness and vision, a collective subject, that the novel has not thoroughly and expansively revealed. The organic presentation of working class character and consciousness that would make the “ours” feel real and explored, wholly expressed and inhabited rather than asserted remains undeveloped throughout.

King Coal (1917) is more compressed and controlled and based on Sinclair’s in-person research in the Colorado mining camps during the 1913-1914 Ludlow Massacre period, the coal industry functioning as systematic murder shown through a protagonist embedded in the working community rather than observing it. A wealthy young man who goes undercover in the mines, Hal Warner under the name Joe Smith, is Sinclair's own investigative method made into the novel’s formal structure, the outside observer entering the organic dispossessed world rather than the dispossessed consciousness generating the narrative from inside. Oil! (1927) — published two years before the Big Bang window — is the most direct bridge between the earlier Sinclair tradition and the 1929-1930 moment, explicitly socialist, directly suppressed, and written with a formal energy that shows Sinclair still developing his method thirty years into his career.

Upton Sinclair’s Nobel Prize nomination history is instructive. He was nominated repeatedly and never won — the prize going to Sinclair Lewis in 1930, the same year as Jews Without Money and Not Without Laughter, the same year Sinclair’s own socialist tradition was producing its greatest concentrated achievement. The Nobel sequence — Lewis 1930, Buck 1938, Faulkner 1949, Hemingway 1954, Steinbeck 1962 — avoided Sinclair and every naturalist during naturalism’s long moment, as did the Pulitzer, despite Sinclair being the most prolific and most politically serious American novelist of the first half of the twentieth century. The Pulitzer even passed over the breezy social satirist Sinclair Lewis for his novel Main Street for being too socially critical in 1920, awarding Edith Wharton instead for her more elegiac The Age of Innocence. Even Wharton expressed “disgust” and “despair” to Lewis at the Pulitzer’s pick. Columbia University’s President Butler, the same official who would block Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls from receiving the award in 1940, changed the Pulitzer criteria in 1920 from “whole atmosphere of American life” to “wholesome” to block Lewis. The Pulitzer acted similarly against Lewis three years later for Babbitt, awarding the Pulitzer to Willa Cather’s pro-war novel One of Ours, one of Cather’s weakest novels versus Lewis’s most famous and influential. The prize culture treated Sinclair and the socially engaged naturalists the same way it treated the Big Bang six. Sinclair’s political consciousness disqualified him from the highest recognition regardless of his literary achievement and import. That message, delivered consistently over decades, is the ideological suppression pattern discrediting the white male civic dispossessed tradition just as it would discredit the more diverse, more engaged, and more accomplished Big Bang tradition in literature — the liberatory literature of the people, which would be unparalleled in its achievement.

Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Sherwood Anderson were similar novelists to Upton Sinclair in being descriptive naturalists, socially conscious, approaching the organic dispossessed tradition without achieving it. Dreiser’s suppressed Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925) were both structural condemnations of American capitalism dramatized through working class and lower class consciousness with serious authority. Dreiser was closer to the organic dispossessed position than Sinclair in his origins if not always in his formal method. He came from poverty, immigrant German Catholic working class origins, and his fiction has the weight of that experience behind it. An American Tragedy, long and accumulative though it is, shows the American Dream as the criminal phenomenon that destroys Clyde Griffiths. Capitalism produces insane desires that lead to murder. Dreiser also became a Communist Party member late in life, in 1945 when pressure was most against it.

Frank Norris is also adjacent to the Big Bang as socially engaged naturalist. McTeague (1899) and The Octopus (1901) are naturalist novels with clear structural awareness of what capitalism does to people. The railroad industry crushes farmers through economic manipulation, legal oppression, and physical violence in The Octopus, while poverty and environment destroy lives in McTeague. But Norris is civic establishment rather than civic dispossessed. He observes the working class and the farmers from outside with sympathy and systemic awareness. He’s not inside the material. His naturalism is a middle class formal technique applied to working class and rural subjects. Some critical insight and judgment are present but the organic position is not, and so the would-be full human consciousness is thin.

Sherwood Anderson as novelist, rather than short story writer, in Marching Men (1917) and Poor White (1920) comes closest to the achievements of the suppressed authors in the Big Bang. His far more famous collection of short stories Winesburg, Ohio (1919) shows psychological damage in small town American life through a series of fragmented consciousnesses, the isolation and thwarted desire of ordinary people — a collection that is formally innovative and personally engaging but politically ambiguous. Marching Men is Anderson’s most explicitly political novel, showing mass movement while ultimately collapsing in reaching for political comprehension, though it does so in an interesting and aesthetic way. Anderson’s politics were not fully coherent, unlike Sinclair’s socialist vision and understanding. The story of Marching Men tells on itself politically in the end. The text seems somehow smarter than Anderson is willing to let it be, either through lack of courage, lack of conviction, lack of perception, or all three — making the ending perhaps as unintentionally or secretly satisfying as it is frustrating. The united power of the people is inspiring despite the narrative point of view largely if not wholly undercutting it in the end. Anderson writes in the rhetorical establishment tradition with civic moments. His formal innovation is real, his political consciousness inconsistent, his organic connection to working class material partial and complicated by his eventual middle class literary identity.

All through the socialist era, Upton Sinclair is the pre-Big Bang white male civic dispossessed tradition at its most consistent and most limited simultaneously, doing the right thing in the wrong sequence. He exposes the oppressive system while expressing human consciousness rather than revealing the system through human consciousness, as human and inhuman consciousness, producing novels that are essential and flawed in the same moment, that matter but fall short of full novel, full human and social achievement. He is one of the tradition’s most important precursors yet with some of the most transparent flaws compared to the Big Bang writers who achieved what he did not. They were not more politically committed. They were more completely inside human consciousness and perception of people and society. They were more fully trusting of the human consciousness as the primary medium of seeing both the horrors and best possibilities of people and society. They were more organically inseparable from what they were writing about, more alert to what the consciousness they were inside actually revealed about the world. He anticipated them by thirty years. They surpassed him in ways that he helped make possible.

Opening of The Jungle (1906):

It was four o’clock when the ceremony was over and the carriages began to arrive. There had been a crowd following all the way, owing to the exuberance of Marija Berczynskas. The occasion rested heavily upon Marija’s broad shoulders—it was her task to see that all things went in due form, and after the best home traditions; and, flying wildly hither and thither, bowling every one out of the way, and scolding and exhorting all day with her tremendous voice, Marija was too eager to see that others conformed to the proprieties to consider them herself. She had left the church last of all, and, desiring to arrive first at the hall, had issued orders to the coachman to drive faster. When that personage had developed a will of his own in the matter, Marija had flung up the window of the carriage, and, leaning out, proceeded to tell him her opinion of him, first in Lithuanian, which he did not understand, and then in Polish, which he did. Having the advantage of her in altitude, the driver had stood his ground and even ventured to attempt to speak; and the result had been a furious altercation, which, continuing all the way down Ashland Avenue, had added a new swarm of urchins to the cortege at each side street for half a mile.

This was unfortunate, for already there was a throng before the door. The music had started up, and half a block away you could hear the dull “broom, broom” of a cello, with the squeaking of two fiddles which vied with each other in intricate and altitudinous gymnastics. Seeing the throng, Marija abandoned precipitately the debate concerning the ancestors of her coachman, and, springing from the moving carriage, plunged in and proceeded to clear a way to the hall. Once within, she turned and began to push the other way, roaring, meantime, “Eik! Eik! Uzdaryk-duris!” in tones which made the orchestral uproar sound like fairy music.

“Z. Graiczunas, Pasilinksminimams darzas. Vynas. Sznapsas. Wines and Liquors. Union Headquarters”—that was the way the signs ran. The reader, who perhaps has never held much converse in the language of far-off Lithuania, will be glad of the explanation that the place was the rear room of a saloon in that part of Chicago known as “back of the yards.” This information is definite and suited to the matter of fact; but how pitifully inadequate it would have seemed to one who understood that it was also the supreme hour of ecstasy in the life of one of God’s gentlest creatures, the scene of the wedding feast and the joy-transfiguration of little Ona Lukoszaite!

Opening of King Coal (1917):

The town of Pedro stood on the edge of the mountain country; a straggling assemblage of stores and saloons from which a number of branch railroads ran up into the canyons, feeding the coal-camps. Through the week it slept peacefully; but on Saturday nights, when the miners came trooping down, and the ranchmen came in on horseback and in automobiles, it wakened to a seething life.

At the railroad station, one day late in June, a young man alighted from a train. He was about twenty-one years of age, with sensitive features, and brown hair having a tendency to waviness. He wore a frayed and faded suit of clothes, purchased in a quarter of his home city where the Hebrew merchants stand on the sidewalks to offer their wares; also a soiled blue shirt without a tie, and a pair of heavy boots which had seen much service. Strapped on his back was a change of clothing and a blanket, and in his pockets a comb, a toothbrush, and a small pocket mirror.

Sitting in the smoking-car of the train, the young man had listened to the talk of the coal-camps, seeking to correct his accent. When he got off the train he proceeded down the track and washed his hands with cinders, and lightly powdered some over his face. After studying the effect of this in his mirror, he strolled down the main street of Pedro, and, selecting a little tobacco-shop, went in. In as surly a voice as he could muster, he inquired of the proprietress, “Can you tell me how to get to the Pine Creek mine?”

The woman looked at him with no suspicion in her glance. She gave the desired information, and he took a trolley and got off at the foot of the Pine Creek canyon, up which he had a thirteen-mile trudge. It was a sunshiny day, with the sky crystal clear, and the mountain air invigourating.

Opening of Oil! (1927):

The road ran, smooth and flawless, precisely fourteen feet wide, the edges trimmed as if by shears, a ribbon of grey concrete, rolled out over the valley by a giant hand. The ground went in long waves, a slow ascent and then a sudden dip; you climbed, and went swiftly over—but you had no fear, for you knew the magic ribbon would be there, clear of obstructions, unmarred by bump or scar, waiting the passage of inflated rubber wheels revolving seven times a second. The cold wind of morning whistled by, a storm of motion, a humming and roaring with ever-shifting overtones; but you sat snug behind a tilted wind-shield, which slid the gale up over your head. Sometimes you liked to put your hand up, and feel the cold impact; sometimes you would peer around the side of the shield, and let the torrent hit your forehead, and toss your hair about. But for the most part you sat silent and dignified—because that was Dad’s way, and Dad’s way constituted the ethics of motoring.

Dad wore an overcoat, tan in color, soft and woolly in texture, opulent in cut, double-breasted, with big collar and big lapels and big flaps over the pockets—every place where a tailor could express munificence. The boy’s coat had been made by the same tailor, of the same soft, woolly material, with the same big collar and big lapels and big flaps. Dad wore driving gauntlets; and the same shop had had the same kind for boys. Dad wore horn-rimmed spectacles; the boy had never been taken to an oculist, but he had found in a drug-store a pair of amber-colored glasses, having horn rims the same as Dad’s. There was no hat on Dad’s head, because he believed that wind and sunshine kept your hair from falling out; so the boy also rode with tumbled locks. The only difference between them, apart from size, was that Dad had a big brown cigar, unlighted, in the corner of his mouth; a survival of the rough old days, when he had driven mule-teams and chewed tobacco.

Fifty miles, said the speedometer; that was Dad’s rule for open country, and he never varied it, except in wet weather. Grades made no difference; the fraction of an ounce more pressure with his right foot, and the car raced on—up, up, up—until it topped the ridge, and was sailing down into the next little valley, exactly in the centre of the magic grey ribbon of concrete. The car would start to gather speed on the down grade, and Dad would lift the pressure of his foot a trifle, and let the resistance of the engine check the speed. Fifty miles was enough, said Dad; he was a man of order.

For all the real similarities between Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck, the other naturalists, and the Big Bang tradition — the socialist politics, the working class subjects, the civic critiques of the system — the deeper formal roots and the fuller human consciousness of what Gold and Smedley and McKay and Hughes and Thurman and Larsen actually achieved in 1929 and 1930, along with Tsiang in 1935 and McNickle in 1936, run not through the white male naturalist and muckraking tradition but through the buried Black and Native American novelist tradition in America. The dispossessed consciousness well lit from inside, the bigoted capitalist imperial system dramatized and detailed as criminal from the organic position, the community as the primary social world rather than the backdrop for a sensitive individual’s development, the prose alive with the energy of people who have everything at stake. The Big Bang’s core novelistic mode comes out of a tradition that runs at least from Frederick Douglass and Martin R. Delany and Frances E. W. Harper and John Rollin Ridge through Sutton E. Griggs and W.E.B. Du Bois and Charles Chesnutt, a tradition that was producing the fullest, most vital expression of human consciousness in American fiction decades before the Big Bang while being systematically buried by the same forces of suppression that would bury the Big Bang itself.

Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave (1853), one of the first Black American novels, is a tight, formally radical account of Madison Washington’s slave revolt that portrays Black revolutionary consciousness from inside with full moral and political authority, slavery understood as criminal and requiring violent overthrow. No mediating narrator explains to a white audience what to feel. Martin Delany’s Blake, or the Huts of America (1862) is also a revolutionary novel of slave insurgence dramatized from inside slavery and Black nationalist political strategy. The novel is an expression of organic consciousness and social perception — “caught in the grip of time, life, and death,” in the words of Jerome McGann — the organic position producing a formal directness and political seriousness that has no equivalent in the white American literary tradition of the period. John Rollin Ridge’s novel The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854) brings Native American dispossessed consciousness into American fiction in its first full novelistic expression. Ridge was a Cherokee writer in California portraying a Mexican bandit hero as a revolutionary figure against American colonial dispossession. The imperial system of racial and economic violence is shown as a point of resistance rather than as backdrop tragedy. McNickle’s The Surrounded relates directly to Ridge seventy years later. W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) and Dark Princess (1928) bring Black intellectual consciousness to bear on the dispossessed experience, the cotton economy as a system of extraction, the international anti-colonial struggle shown with scope and ambition. And Charles Chesnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream (1905) — his third novel and fifth book of fiction — exposes the white South’s systematic destruction of Reconstruction’s possibilities. It was ideologically dismissed as propaganda rather than literature, at which point Chesnutt’s novels were no longer published. Five novels would be published posthumously. The political content of The Colonel’s Dream was used to disqualify the aesthetic achievement. The reactionary New Critics would systematize this approach a generation later against Gold and Smedley and the whole line, against the tendency and tradition of the people’s liberatory literature. This was the politicized depoliticized ideology that the liberal and conservative establishment, the dual pistons of empire, entirely drove.

The liveliest of these early novels of the dispossessed predate the period when naturalism’s documentary method constrained even the organic dispossessed tradition’s formal expression. Douglass and Ridge, Delany, and especially Harper and Griggs at their best in the latter half of the nineteenth century wrote with a vitality and directness that Chesnutt and Du Bois, and the naturalists — in their excessive documentary, scholarly, and clinically investigative style — struggled to match.

In addition to many books of poetry, many speeches and essays, and the first short story by an African American woman, and other works, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper wrote four novels, not merely the final, more establishment, and lesser novel that she is most known for, Iola Leroy (1892). Her three novels that most powerfully anticipate the Big Bang’s core mode were serialized in the Christian Recorder between 1869 and 1889 and remained entirely unknown to literary scholarship until Frances Smith Foster rediscovered them in the early 1990s, over a century after they were written. Harper’s first great novel Minnie’s Sacrifice (1869), as Foster notes, “was published in a black paper, by a black woman, for black readers — during Reconstruction.” Foster was shocked and astonished that Harper’s first three novels remained buried until she unearthed them. Harper is a remarkable historical figure and prolific author across many genres and forms, and her best novels are some of the most scandalously overlooked in American literary history. Minnie’s Sacrifice reads as if the great novelists of the literary Big Bang of 1929-1930 had been writing fully sixty years earlier in 1869.

Minnie’s Sacrifice (1869) explores miscegenation, passing, the institutionalized rape of enslaved women, and Reconstruction politics with a direct narrative approach and form that Iola Leroy — written twenty years later for a broader and more white audience — doesn’t measure up to. Trial and Triumph (1889) shows an African American community overcoming hardship through solidarity and love. Rather than the exceptional individual maneuvering through white society, the community is the primary focus, which is characteristic of the Big Bang tradition’s great narratives of the dispossessed forty years ahead of time. The liveliness, the direct appeal, the intimate engaging element, the political seriousness, the insider view, these are Harper’s defining qualities in the serialized novels, and they are the qualities Gold and Hughes and McKay and Smedley achieve in 1929 and 1930 within a tradition that runs directly through Harper whether they knew it or not. That Iola Leroy became the known Harper novel, more accommodating to white readership expectations, while Minnie’s Sacrifice and Trial and Triumph remained buried for a century is suppression within the suppressed tradition itself, the establishment’s selective recovery allowing the version most acceptable to it while burying more liberatory and human work that also happens to be the far more engaging and compelling novels. The rediscovery described by one scholar as “the literary find of the century” did not occur until 1994, sixty-five years after the American literary Big Bang, a century after the novels were written, because the suppression was that thorough.

Sutton Griggs’ Imperium in Imperio (1899) may be the most formally inventive and politically radical Black American novel before the Big Bang, with a focus on a secret Black nationalist government operating within the United States, showing Black political consciousness and collective strategy with great liveliness and intelligence, and significant humor. Griggs was self-publishing and selling his novels out of his own church to Black community audiences because the white publishing establishment would not touch them. The counter-institutional mode that foreran Tsiang’s self-publication in 1935 is present here, with Griggs selling his novels by hand three decades before Tsiang did the same. Sutton E. Griggs and Frances Harper along with Charles Chesnutt created some of the most sustained and politically serious American fiction between Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance — surpassing in normative and human terms anything the white literary tradition was producing in the same period, leading into the Big Bang’s mode a generation on. Griggs’ Imperium in Imperio, as with Frances Harper’s first novels, was too important for the establishment to allow it to reach a broad readership. It was literally too good to publish.

The tradition of these Black and Native liberatory people’s novelists — Douglass, Delany, Ridge, Du Bois, Chesnutt, Harper, Griggs — are the tradition that Gold and McKay and Smedley and Hughes and Thurman and Larsen wrote inside, consciously or not, when they produced the Big Bang. The core mode of the Big Bang novels — the liveliness, the directness, the political seriousness, the personal intimacy, the social sight, the prose tied tight to the consciousness inside the material, the community depicted with full dignity, the system named as criminal without apology or mediation — is not primarily Sinclair extended, not Steinbeck anticipated, not Norris radicalized. It’s the Black and Native American dispossessed literary tradition finally reaching its concentrated moment of greatest achievement in a publishing window that the establishment could not entirely close before the work was out. The white muckrakers and the naturalists, the white socialists and progressives were part of the context. The buried Black and Native American novelists were the roots.

By incorporating 1) the civic condemnation and systemic analysis of the white naturalist and socialist tradition, and 2) the dispossessed consciousness and community-centered formal depth of the Black and Native American tradition, and 3) by writing against and selectively refining the establishment’s aesthetic approaches, the Big Bang novelists combined the best qualities of liberatory critique with deep notes of human consciousness and the lively touch of direct aesthetic engagement to create the greatest American literature in history. The white socialist and naturalist-realist tradition in the novel — Sinclair, Norris, Dreiser, Anderson — contributed a civic indictment, the systemic analysis, the willingness to point to capitalism as the engine of suffering. The Black and Native American tradition — running from Douglass and Delany and Ridge through Harper and Griggs and Du Bois and Chesnutt — contributed something deeper, broader, and in some ways harder to name: the dispossessed consciousness fully lit from inside, the community as primary social world, the prose inseparable from the stakes of the people inside it, with the bigoted imperial forces hammering everywhere. What the Big Bang writers took from the establishment was a post-naturalist artistic focus, while ditching the blinkering weaknesses of the stripped formal compression Hemingway was being celebrated for and the winding psychological interiority Faulkner was being praised for, ditching the modernist crap but taking some of the psychological interior strengths. The Big Bang novels absorbed, critiqued, and surpassed these works with their intimate awareness and perspectives of dispossession and liberatory social engagement, with the conscience and consciousness and sheer social sight, wholly reworking the novel form so as not to perform sensitivity from positions of security and entitlement but to express a much more vast and penetrating human consciousness, conscience, and social and political and cultural perception.

The result was so great, and so different by orders of magnitude in human depth, liberatory seriousness, and artistic achievement, that the canonized Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, Wolfe, and Steinbeck were left behind — not by any external measure of sales or prizes or critical reception, all of which the establishment controlled and used against the Big Bang, but by the only measure that finally matters: the fullness of human consciousness and social perception dramatized and discoursed on the page, the society and culture and psychology revealed and evaluated with direct accuracy, the community shown with full dignity and full stakes. By that measure — the measure this project has been applying from the beginning — the canonical novelists produced Confederate and capitalist monuments in prose while Gold and McKay and Smedley and Hughes and Larsen and Thurman, and soon thereafter McNickle and Tsiang, created the great literature of the time, and for all time.

The literary establishment knew it, or knew enough to act, or instinctively mobilized immediately right in line with the entire anti-Communist, Red Scare, Cold War, supremacist and capitalist political establishment to crush the tradition that Harper was writing in 1869 and Griggs was selling door to door in 1899 and that went supernova in 1929. The FBI surveillance, the HUAC investigations, the loyalty oath requirements of Truman’s Executive Order 9835, the McCarran Act, the blacklists, the armed services editions, the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes, the publishing censorship, the New Critical apparatus that systematically dispensed with political content as aesthetic disqualification, the Cold War funding of journals through the Congress for Cultural Freedom. All of it turned the clock back ideologically and systematically by decades, for decades, burying the Big Bang under layers of institutional forgetting and deceit so thorough that the recovery and evaluation is still badly incomplete. The great timeless literature was smeared as partisan, political, transient, and too insufficient and incomplete to be universal. And corrupted literature was lofted.

The multicultural explosion that began forcing the bigoted imperial establishment partially back from its endless deceit and falsehoods from the 1960s onward — Morrison and Silko and Kingston and Walker and the writers who went with them into the tradition the establishment had buried — was not a new development so much as another wave of the same buried tradition asserting itself. The dispossessed consciousness and the community-focused mode and the culture and society shown as corrupt and criminal erupted again through the lid the plutocrat establishment worked so hard to keep sealed. The power of white supremacy and capitalist imperialism in American society and politics cannot be overstated. It’s immense, entrenched, and ongoing. The institutions and establishment absorbed what they could of the new people’s uprising, canonized the versions most compatible with its ideology, and held the rest at the margins. And continue to do so today. The multicultural canon that the establishment eventually constructed was the same selective operation it had performed on the Big Bang. It admitted enough diversity to claim inclusivity while blocking and burying the tradition’s most liberatory formal and political energies and revelations.

The literary establishment stands firmly on that lid, its instruments of suppression pressing and grinding at full power. The prize culture rewards historical distance over contemporary condemnation; the MFA system reproduces the New Critical and postmodern suspicion of political content and clarity as aesthetic and intellectual failure; publishing is consolidated into a handful of corporate houses and ideologically aligned establishment institutions whose interests and demands are materially and ideologically opposed to explicit contemporary liberatory socialist fiction; the gutted and establishmentarian literary review and discourse culture brainwashes and lobotomizes all the while about what counts as serious and accomplished literature. Against all of it, another great and impending liberatory socialist explosion in the American novel and American literature is building. Against the establishment’s blinkered vacuities and regimented ideological niceties, against its marginally critical and marginally expressive human consciousness and social sight, the liberatory humanistic and revolutionary tradition that Harper was writing in 1869 and Griggs was selling door to door in 1899 has continued through many decades of suppression and is building again now toward its next great explosion.

The opening of Minnie’s Sacrifice (1869):

Miriam sat in her lowly cabin, painfully rocking her body to and fro; for a great sorrow had fallen upon her life. She had been the mother of three children, two had died in their infancy, and now her last, her loved and only child was gone, but not like the rest, who had passed away almost as soon as their little feet had touched the threshold of existence. She had been entangled in the mazes of sin and sorrow; and her sun had gone down in darkness. It was the old story. Agnes, fair, young and beautiful, had been a slave, with no power to protect herself from the highest insults that brutality could offer to innocence. Bound hand and foot by that system, which has since gone down in wrath, and blood, and tears, she had fallen a victim to the wiles and power of her master; and the result was the introduction of a child of shame into a world of sin and suffering; for herself an early grave; and for her mother a desolate and breaking heart.

While Miriam was sitting down hopelessly beneath the shadow of her mighty grief, gazing ever and anon on the pale dead face, which seemed to bear in its sad but gentle expression, an appeal from earth to heaven, some of the slaves would hurry in, and looking upon the fair young face, would drop a word of pity for the weeping mother, and then hurry on to their appointed tasks. All day long Miriam sat alone with her dead, except when these kindly interruptions broke upon the monotony of her sorrow.

The opening of Imperium in Imperio (1899):

BERL TROUT’S DYING DECLARATION.

I am a traitor. I have violated an oath that was as solemn and binding as any ever taken by man on earth.

I have trampled under my feet the sacred trust of a loving people, and have betrayed secrets which were dearer to them than life itself.

For this offence, regarded the world over as the most detestable of horrors, I shall be slain.

Those who shall be detailed to escort my foul body to its grave are required to walk backwards with heads averted.

On to-morrow night, the time of my burial, the clouds should gather thick about the queenly moon to hide my funeral procession from her view, for fear that she might refuse to longer reign over a land capable of producing such a wretch as I.

In the bottom of some old forsaken well, so reads our law, I shall be buried, face downward, without a coffin; and my body, lying thus, will be transfixed with a wooden stave.

Fifty feet from the well into which my body is lowered, a red flag is to be hoisted and kept floating there for time unending, to warn all generations of men to come not near the air polluted by the rotting carcass of a vile traitor.

Such is my fate. I seek not to shun it. I have walked into odium with every sense alert, fully conscious of every step taken.

While I acknowledge that I am a traitor, I also pronounce myself a patriot.

It is true that I have betrayed the immediate plans of the race to which I belong; but I have done this in the interest of the whole human family—of which my race is but a part.

My race may, for the time being, shower curses upon me; but eventually all races, including my own, shall call me blessed.

The earth, in anger, may belch forth my putrid flesh with volcanic fury, but the out-stretched arms of God will receive my spirit as a token of approval of what I have done.

With my soul feasting on this happy thought, I send this revelation to mankind and yield my body to the executioner to be shot until I am dead.

Though death stands just before me, holding before my eyes my intended shroud woven of the cloth of infamy itself, I shrink not back.

Yours, doomed to die,
BERL TROUT.

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The House of Mirth (1905) — Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton is significantly more accomplished than F. Scott Fitzgerald across their full bodies of work. The quality of her writing is more consistent, more penetrating, more morally serious, with four major novels of genuine sustained achievement — The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, and Ethan Frome. Fitzgerald has one major novel and several lesser ones. Wharton shares Fitzgerald’s class position and its limitations. Wharton is more inside the entitled world with the full weight of organic experience, the social codes and moral hypocrisies delineated in a way that comes from having lived them rather than having aspired to them. Fitzgerald aspired to the entitled world from slightly outside it, which may account for his glamorization of it. Wharton dissects the entitled class. Fitzgerald elegizes it. In Gramscian terms Wharton is more fully organic to the entitled class than Fitzgerald. She writes from inside its experience rather than from the position of the aspirant who has married into it and romanticized what he found there. That organic insider position gives her greater formal and moral access to the class’s operations even while both remain entirely outside the organic dispossessed position that produces the greatest literature. Lily Bart’s destruction in House of Mirth is shown with a sex and class clarity and moral seriousness that Nick Carraway’s elegiac narration of Gatsby never reaches. Wharton is clinically inside the social constructions that destroy Lily while Fitzgerald is on the outside looking in at Gatsby’s situation, observing with longing and belatedly with critique.

Both novels focus on a protagonist of insufficient means trying to gain access to or maintain a position in a world of big money and high social status. Lily Bart is a woman born inside the elite trying to maintain her position without being bound by its most offensive demands. Gatsby is an outsider trying to buy his way in. Lily is destroyed by the system she tries to navigate on her own terms. Gatsby is destroyed by the carelessness and cruelty of the individuals at the system’s top, and this is Fitzgerald’s characteristic limitation, personalizing what Wharton shows as structural. Both show the carelessness and cruelty of the very rich, but where Wharton shows it as more socially constructed Fitzgerald shows it as personal. Wharton writes from inside with anatomical knowledge, her prose more controlled and ironic, her social observation more precise. Fitzgerald’s prose is more lyrical and romantic, his social observation more mythological and more romantic. Gatsby is a plutocratic American dream myth. Wharton’s more socially circumspect story makes no such attempt.

Focusing on the personalization, the myth, and the dream, as opposed to the structural social oppression, is a big part of what makes The Great Gatsby so ideologically useful. It both critiques and glorifies the capitalist dream, making it feel fraught and tantalizing simultaneously, which is a more insidious ideological representation than simple celebration. Malcolm X spoke the truth for most people in a single line: “They call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.” It does in one sentence what Fitzgerald takes two hundred pages to do, and cuts harder. The former speaking for social change, the latter writing for social adulation.

Both novels share the fundamental limitation of being confined to the world of the privileged. The poor exist as backdrop. The working class exists as passing contrast or victim. Wharton’s greater accomplishment within the entitled rhetorical establishment stream doesn’t move her closer to the Big Bang tradition’s core mode. Her novels show what the establishment tradition can achieve while remaining entirely within the entitled consciousness. The “valley of ashes” is present in Wharton too, viewed from above with moral seriousness rather than from inside with organic authority. Wharton is the establishment tradition’s most formally accomplished voice prior to the Big Bang, a real achievement and a real limit simultaneously. Her novels are matched by Hawthorne in a different mode, approached by Cather, while Henry James essentially became an English novelist. His absorption into England’s ultra refined literary culture worsened the failure of proportion that his brother William James identified in his letters — the over-elaboration of slight material.

The contrast with the Big Bang is stark and clarifying. While Fitzgerald continued writing about the parochial privileged through his final complete novel Tender is the Night (1934), Gold’s Jews Without Money was being read by the working class people it portrayed, Smedley was writing about class and feminist consciousness and revolutionary movements, McKay brought to life the Harlem working class and African diaspora from the Marseille waterfront with a sweeping global view, Hughes voiced vibrant Black Kansas with great warmth and detail, and Nella Larsen and Wallace Thurman dramatized race, class, and sex with cutting psychological and social precision. These writers expressed a far more sweeping and dramatic, far more profound and representative universe of people than anything from the entitled propertied confines of the canon of the time: Fitzgerald, Wharton, Hemingway, Faulkner, James, Wolfe, Dos Passos, and the rest.

That The Great Gatsby has become the representative American novel while The House of Mirth remains important but secondary is a telling ideological fact. The male version of the story of privileged aspiration and its tragic end is supposedly more representative, more universal, more American than the female version of a similar story. Lily Bart’s destruction is a woman’s tragedy and social lament. Gatsby’s murder is the American dream’s tragedy and personal horror. That canonical distinction does not focus on the quality and import of the novels. It focuses on whose experience and what type of experiences get to stand as universal and get to be celebrated or even seen as American and great. The establishment guts even itself, let alone the larger, greater world of the people’s literature. That The Great Gatsby is the Great American Novel and The House of Mirth is important but secondary says a lot about what the canon is built to celebrate and what it is built to suppress. The more carefully you look the more obvious it becomes in whose image the American literary canon is built, and upon what myths and falsehoods the image is built. And far less is changed today than is commonly realized, admitted, or allowed to be known and acted upon.

The opening of The House of Mirth:

Selden paused in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed by the sight of Miss Lily Bart.

It was a Monday in early September, and he was returning to his work from a hurried dip into the country; but what was Miss Bart doing in town at that season? If she had appeared to be catching a train, he might have inferred that he had come on her in the act of transition between one and another of the country-houses which disputed her presence after the close of the Newport season; but her desultory air perplexed him. She stood apart from the crowd, letting it drift by her to the platform or the street, and wearing an air of irresolution which might, as he surmised, be the mask of a very definite purpose. It struck him at once that she was waiting for someone, but he hardly knew why the idea arrested him. There was nothing new about Lily Bart, yet he could never see her without a faint movement of interest: it was characteristic of her that she always roused speculation, that her simplest acts seemed the result of far-reaching intentions.

An impulse of curiosity made him turn out of his direct line to the door, and stroll past her. He knew that if she did not wish to be seen she would contrive to elude him; and it amused him to think of putting her skill to the test.

“Mr. Selden—what good luck!”

She came forward smiling, eager almost, in her resolve to intercept him. One or two persons, in brushing past them, lingered to look; for Miss Bart was a figure to arrest even the suburban traveller rushing to his last train.

Henry James at his late peak wrote The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904) at the very beginning of the twentieth century — already deep in the socialist era, exactly midway between the Civil War and World War Two, less than two decades before World War One, Red Summer, and the First Red Scare. Given what was already happening in American and world history, the elaborate social novels of both James and Wharton can seem not merely limited but willfully anachronistic. The entitled consciousness was turned inward with maximum formal elaboration at the long historical moment when the conditions producing the Big Bang tradition were building, some of which the naturalists were exploring in their novels — Norris, Dreiser, Sinclair, Anderson — and which the most dispossessed proto-Big Bang novelists were also dramatizing: Charles Chesnutt in The Colonel’s Dream (1905), Sutton Griggs in Imperium in Imperio (1899), and Frances Harper in Minnie’s Sacrifice (1869) and Trial and Triumph (1889), all published in the same years James was producing his most elaborately evacuated social novels of entitled consciousness. The dispossessed people’s tradition produced vital literature throughout and was systematically drowned out by the propertied establishment tradition the whole time — and also actively blocked and suppressed.

While James was perfecting the formal technique of dramatizing nothing directly, of approaching social reality through so many layers of qualification and mediation that the social reality itself dissolves into the consciousness perceiving it, in Sister Carrie (1900) Dreiser was dramatizing Carrie Meeber on the streets of Chicago, industrial capitalism crushing her. Chesnutt exposed the white South’s systematic destruction of Reconstruction’s possibilities so directly in The Colonel’s Dream that it ended his would-be literary career. Griggs was forced to self-publish his Black nationalist novels and sell them door to door because no white publisher would touch them, and Harper had already written Minnie’s Sacrifice and Trial and Triumph decades earlier — buried and lost for more than a century — with a directness and a political seriousness about people’s community consciousness that James’s entire body of work never approaches.

Suppression took many forms. Griggs self-published because no white publisher would touch him. Harper wrote for the Black press because the white literary establishment did not exist for her or her readers. And Dreiser’s Sister Carrie — closer to the establishment than either — faced a different but equally effective form of suppression — internal censorship and neglect. Suppression operates at every level of culture and publishing in ways that need to be sought out and countered, not only against the most radical and most dispossessed voices but against anyone whose work threatens the propertied establishment’s ideology of what American literature should be. Doubleday, Page & Company signed a contract to publish Sister Carrie, but senior partner Frank Nelson Doubleday and his wife, Neltje De Graff Doubleday, strongly objected to the novel’s frank depiction of adultery, prostitution, and materialistic ambition without conventional moral punishment. The firm cut about 36,000 words from the manuscript, printed only a few hundred copies, halted advertising after release, and allowed the novel to disappear commercially, keeping it obscure until Dreiser forced out a new edition in 1907.

All the while the social and psychological, artistic and political forces that would account for the Big Bang gathered and built. The Big Bang was not a sudden eruption from nowhere. It was the culmination of a tradition that had been building for more than half a century while the canonical establishment perfected the art of looking away — much like today. Explicit contemporary anti-empire and anti-war, anti-genocide literature — no thanks. Such a faux pas. Such propaganda. How offensive! Such literature is the new taboo, the new adultery, too crass, too explicit to be allowed to mar literary form and human consciousness. And anyway, what genocide? Surely none committed by America ongoing. How dare you say so! Not in our explicit contemporary literature. That belongs to historical literature, and preferably only crimes against humanity committed by non-American countries. Let not contemporary literary consciousness and perception be most relevant to the present moment. And let’s keep it out of popular culture too, thank you very much.

And so it goes, now as then, the establishment elaborating the entitled consciousness with great formal sophistication, or dramatizing the oppressed but very partially or at a safe historical or geographic and cultural distance. Never mind the social and historical long span of Civil War Reconstruction and pre-World War One socialism when the organic dispossessed tradition produced vital literature that the establishment worked with determination to suppress by encouraging and lauding the plutocrat vein of literature, and by otherwise blocking and burying the consciousness and perspectives of the dispossessed. That’s how you inculcate a plutocracy-dominated society, producing a fractured and bamboozled citizenry. That’s how you keep peoples and communities from knowing themselves. That’s how you give the public its problems. That’s how you get Trump and the neofascist right, and that’s how you get the liberal establishment that enables them and is largely capitalist tyrannical itself. That’s how you kill liberatory socialism and progressive populism. The blinded can’t see it. The establishmentarians don’t care, or care too much in the opposite direction, toward the suppression rather than against it, and so become the cultural and political menace that they are, though they think they are not. They think they are civilized and not propagandistic, neither of which is true in any meaningful sense, whatever the conventional reassurances and beliefs. Ah, the ironies of literature. The new socialist and cultural renaissance will need to build itself, by itself, for the world. This is where the greatest literature and the most vital cultural expression continue to come from. Not from the lobotomized, brainwashed, and truncated self-regarding establishment of the entitled and propertied, hegemonic and genocidal — including literary genocide.

The early twentieth century canonical apex of American fiction is occupied by reputation in large part by the main novels of Wharton and Fitzgerald, and by the plutocrat Henry James’ rich socialite novels, working essentially the same privileged social territory from different angles. The vastly more various and the more psychologically, socially, and intellectually complete novels of the Big Bang, the suppressed novels, explore the African diaspora, Jewish immigrant poverty, female working class revolutionary consciousness, Black Kansas, intra-racial color politics and are ranked below the privileged-class novels or excluded entirely. The canonical hierarchy does not reflect literary achievement primarily. It shows instead whose social world the gatekeepers of that hierarchy consider broadly representative and respectable and whose worlds they consider marginal, disposable, propagandistic, and aesthetically inferior, in reverse of order of reality. The traditional canon is a kind of establishment hallucination as inversion of reality that is imposed upon the populace, especially by the time of the Big Bang and thereafter, and through times past. And the whole dominant culture shapes and participates in this inversion of reality to grotesque impoverished and disastrous effect.

With minimal exceptions, James’s imaginative world is almost entirely bounded by the wealthy, the leisured, the socially positioned, Americans abroad with money enough to spend years in Europe drinking in culture, English aristocrats and their houses, the upper reaches of transatlantic society where money is assumed and the drama is mainly about manners, private consciousness, and social nuance. The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl, The Portrait of a Lady, these are all novels in which nobody has to work for a living in any meaningful sense, in which the central dramas are dramas of private consciousness and social positioning among people whose material existence is entirely secured.

The New Critics and the rest of the postwar literary establishment elevated their plutocrat idol and ally Henry James as the supreme master of the novel by valorizing psychological interiority, formal consciousness, and overwrought novels of wealthy manners and personalities, no matter how byzantine. This amounted to the bankruptcy of American literature, as suppressed critic Maxwell Geismar called it — fiction, poetry, and criticism all — novelist and critic James hand-in-glove with poet and critic T.S. Eliot, both figures canonized and exalted as preeminent American art and criticism, despite both authors having rejected America to go live in the ever more rarefied and elite past of literary Europe. Could establishment literary mystifications be more ironic. The establishment clings to the literary lies of its times.

Meanwhile, even after the unmatched people’s efflorescence of the Big Bang, the intense human and societal power of the Harlem Renaissance and the socialist era fully released and expressed in artistic form, the literary establishment claimed or implied that diverse, working class, and socialist novels lacked the psychological substance, heft, or universality to compete with James, Wharton, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, and others, with some partial and passing exceptions made for John Steinbeck’s Depression era forays, and for Richard Wright and scant few others in the coming decades. When Lionel Trilling and the New York intellectuals constructed and reinforced the Cold War literary canon that buried Gold, Smedley, McKay, and the like, Henry James was the primary reference point for what serious literary fiction should aspire to — elaborate technique and interiority and the otherwise entitled and rhetorical line of literature rather than the diverse and liberatory civic line. And where some seeming literature of ordinary people might be allowed, best to keep it choked and manly minimalist like Hemingway or baroque and diversionary like Faulkner.

Meanwhile, all laud James, the novelist whose imaginative world is almost entirely confined to the leisure class, who literally could not cast working class, dispossessed, diverse or socialist consciousness with the depth and authority he brought to the consciousness of the very rich. Henry James, American plutocrat emigrant, was installed as the standard of literary seriousness against which the novels exploring populist consciousness from inside were judged and found artistically insufficient. Otherwise there was the baroque obscurant Faulkner, or the choked minimalist Hemingway, both themselves safely propertied and entitled in establishment mindset — in sight, consciousness, and empathy. James, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway fit the canonical hierarchy’s ideological criteria almost too perfectly, the baroque and constrained establishment formalist novelists of the entitled and the elite as the supreme measures of literary achievement, against which the direct and liberatory people’s novelists of the dispossessed must always fall short by canonical design. They are the ones who are propagandistic in their humanistic impulses, don’t you know, not the scribes of property and entitlement. Despite some ameliorating effects of the multicultural explosion in recent decades, the American literary hierarchy remains upside down. It’s pervasively misunderstood at best and actively enforced at worst, a cultural, psychological, and political evisceration of consciousness and life that it remains. The literary canon is a menace to society.

Henry James versus Agnes Smedley is a revealing contrast of the canonically worthy and unworthy, which may put too fine a point on it. The comparison is laughable and grotesque. But then think of what is being compared — the literary establishment versus the people. For the moneyed eyes of the establishment, Henry James sits with his exquisite puzzling of the consciousness of wealthy Americans in European [with]drawing rooms, his famous difficulty, his labyrinthine syntax enacting the complexity of privileged social negotiation, elevated as the pinnacle of the novelistic tradition. Smedley runs through the day with her Cherokee working class feminist consciousness illuminating political and cultural and historical epochs and the full sweep of the revolutionary movements of her time, her prose driven by basic life necessities and political urgency, spilling over to desperation and rising to great triumphs of consciousness, sight, and feeling, and she is buried and forgotten, while James is elevated and celebrated. The canonical hierarchy, which could scarcely be more plutocratic in inclination, chose James, Fitzgerald, Wharton, Faulkner, Hemingway, and eventually the gutted white savior novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The choice was neither aesthetic nor art-informed but ideological, and recognizing it as such is necessary to build the critical vocabulary that can properly value American (and world) literature, including what Agnes Smedley achieved, along with the other great powerful diverse and enlightened dispossessed novelists of the people.

On the Jamesian prose style itself, the famous late James difficulty, the sentences that qualify and subordinate and loop back on themselves endlessly, the difficulty is real and the consciousness it navigates can be real, but it is the consciousness of people with enough leisure and security to conduct their entire inner lives at the level of nuance and implication, for whom little seems pressing enough to require a direct statement. It is in this sense the prose style of the privileged, a style that assumes the reader has the time and the education and the security to follow its elaborations, that assumes nothing in the world is pressing hard enough to demand simpler and more direct expression.

Compare it to Michael Gold’s bounding prose, as if generated by pulsing energy of the streets and neighborhood, and Smedley’s blazing lines incensed by oppression, rage, and dispossession, and Wallace Thurman’s matter-of-fact astute psychological carvings, and the lively illuminating and moving narratives of Larsen, Hughes, McKay, and several years later Tsiang and McNickle, cutting swift and sharp through the day with the quick alertness that surviving, working, and ultimately thriving requires. The elaborate style of James with its endless qualifications describes privilege and performs it, assuming the reader has the time and education, energy or security to follow where it leads. That the New Critics arbitrarily and destructively declared social context off-limits for literary analysis was no neutral methodological choice, no universal insight of higher intelligence, or basic necessity of aesthetic analysis. It was the opposite of anything neutral, fully intelligent, or necessary. They believed themselves to be the enlightened ones, and the morally respectable ones, these Southern reactionary critics whom the whole establishment embraced, bigoted and capitalist that it was and remains. New Criticism allowed a prose style built for the leisured and entitled classes — convoluted, symbolic, obsessive — to be installed as the universal standard of literary seriousness and sophistication. New Criticism and its formalist forerunners and followers reduced art to aesthetics, gutted the normative consciousness, sight, and life of the people, for the sake of menacing formalisms that serve oppressive class and other oppressive norms and interests while claiming the universal. What is needed is the fulfilment of American literature, not its bankruptcy.

The opening of The Wings of the Dove:

She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. It was at this point, however, that she remained; changing her place, moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair upholstered in a glazed cloth that gave at once—she had tried it—the sense of the slippery and of the sticky. She had looked at the sallow prints on the walls and at the lonely magazine, a year old, that combined, with a small lamp in coloured glass and a knitted white centre-piece wanting in freshness, to enhance the effect of the purplish cloth on the principal table; she had above all, from time to time, taken a brief stand on the small balcony to which the pair of long windows gave access. The vulgar little street, in this view, offered scant relief from the vulgar little room; its main office was to suggest to her that the narrow black house-fronts, adjusted to a standard that would have been low even for backs, constituted quite the publicity implied by such privacies. One felt them in the room exactly as one felt the room—the hundred like it or worse—in the street. Each time she turned in again, each time, in her impatience, she gave him up, it was to sound to a deeper depth, while she tasted the faint, flat emanation of things, the failure of fortune and of honour. If she continued to wait it was really, in a manner, that she might not add the shame of fear, of individual, personal collapse, to all the other shames. To feel the street, to feel the room, to feel the table-cloth and the centre-piece and the lamp, gave her a small, salutary sense, at least, of neither shirking nor lying. This whole vision was the worst thing yet—as including, in particular, the interview for which she had prepared herself; and for what had she come but for the worst? She tried to be sad, so as not to be angry; but it made her angry that she couldn’t be sad. And yet where was misery, misery too beaten for blame and chalk-marked by fate like a “lot” at a common auction, if not in these merciless signs of mere mean, stale feelings?

John Steinbeck presents the most interesting and most instructive borderline case in the entire canonical tradition as the writer who came closest to the Big Bang tradition without belonging to it, whose best work gestures toward the organic dispossessed position without achieving it, and whose career trajectory from social sympathy to Cold War collaboration reveals what happens to writers who approach the establishment’s ideological line without crossing it. If they don’t commit to the implications of dispossession and oppression in American society, what are they committing to exactly?

Cup of Gold, Steinbeck’s first novel, despite being published in 1929 is not a Big Bang novel and was never a candidate for inclusion. It’s an apprentice work and a historical novel about the British pirate Henry Morgan who later became a plantation owner and lieutenant governor in Jamaica. The novel’s subject may indicate something about Steinbeck’s ultimate imperial political development but the accident of its 1929 publication date means nothing in the Big Bang argument. Steinbeck was not an organic novelist of the people, despite his later famous and temporary approximations of the organic position.

Steinbeck as he matters most wrote Tortilla Flat (1935), In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and The Grapes of Wrath (1939) — the four short years of the Depression-era Steinbeck who capitalized on the Communist proletarian movement in literature and culture, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Great Depression, by dramatizing the California agricultural working class with civic seriousness and real structural awareness of how capitalism hurts people and communities. This Steinbeck is the civic establishment tradition at its most accomplished and honest, closer to the Big Bang tradition than any other canonical white American novelist. He writes about the dispossessed with personal sympathy and societal awareness, the system present as the determining reality of his characters’ lives.

Where Steinbeck is observational and ultimately detached, Gold and Smedley are organic and intimately tied in. The Joads are dramatized with sympathy and social insight from outside the experience of being a Joad. Steinbeck was not a migrant agricultural worker, was not inside the material in the way Smedley was inside Missouri farm poverty and Gold was inside Lower East Side tenement poverty. The difference is not only biographical. It’s formal and political. The Grapes of Wrath shows working class dispossession with power but does not emphasize capitalism as the criminal system in the explicit socially and politically constructed way Gold, Smedley, and McKay both dramatize and explain it in their Big Bang novels. Nor in the overt and thoroughgoing way that Hugo does in Les Misérables where he writes not from the organic dispossessed position but from the fully counter-hegemonic one, which in Hugo’s case produces the same formal and normative results. The Joads suffer the system’s violence without the novel providing the political consciousness that would explain what the system is and demand its transformation. This is classic fiction gutted. Gutted of full consciousness and societal understanding and revelation. The famous intercalary chapters, Steinbeck’s most formally ambitious approach, provide social and economic context but not structural indictment in the Big Bang sense. The system is shown destroying people. It is not named as a criminal enterprise requiring revolutionary transformation. For these and other reasons the approach and style is descriptively and normatively limited compared to the Big Bang tradition’s direct and revelatory engagement. Steinbeck does not know how to marry psychological intensity with sociological intensity. For the most part, he does both dully, as if looking from a dead-eye camera — a third-rate mimicry of lizard-eye Hemingway who was already second-rate. Both record surfaces without the full human consciousness behind them that would make those surfaces reveal their deeper human and social meaning. These distinctions are the difference between the civic establishment tradition at its laborious best and the organic dispossessed tradition at its most direct and revelatory. It’s second-rate lit compared to great lit.

Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in 1962, after Hemingway in 1954 and Faulkner in 1949, after Sinclair Lewis in 1930 and Pearl Buck in 1938. The Nobel sequence is itself a document of canonical priorities. Lewis won the same year as Jews Without Money and Not Without Laughter and Banjo and the other monumental and landmark Big Bang novels. The prize went to the breezy social satirist of the white middle class, while the Big Bang people’s tradition published its greatest concentrated achievement and received not even a minor establishment award. Buck won for novels of Chinese peasant life, the dispossessed dramatized sympathetically from the missionary observer’s position, civic establishment applied to foreign material, safely distant from American class politics. Of course the Nobel Prize is not an American award but is very indicative of capitalist standards that are international. Hemingway and Faulkner received the prize with all their establishment whitewashing. Steinbeck’s Nobel is the most interesting of the sequence, the prize committee reaching toward the civic tradition, rewarding the writer who came closest to the Big Bang’s civic consciousness without achieving its organic position — though long after he did so — giving the prize to the sympathetic observer of the dispossessed rather than to the writers inside the dispossession. The prize was awarded long after Steinbeck wrote his best work, as the committee acknowledged, and also after he had turned right as he aged, just as the prize was denied to Tolstoy largely because he turned left with age.

Steinbeck’s rightward shift is one of American literary history’s worst trajectories and one of its most politically revealing. The writer of The Grapes of Wrath became a supporter of the Vietnam War, a personal friend of war monger Lyndon Johnson, a defender of American military intervention, a writer whose later work — East of Eden (1952), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961) — retreated from the civic consciousness of his Depression-era work into the private, domestic, and mythological obsessions of the establishment tradition. His sons served in Vietnam and Steinbeck visited the war zone as a correspondent, filing dispatches that were basically pro-war. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Johnson in 1964.

Steinbeck also cooperated with American intelligence. He worked with the United States Information Agency, had close relationships with figures in the national security establishment, and allowed himself to be used as a cultural Cold War asset. The writer who narrated the Joads’ dispossession with the closest thing to organic sympathy the canonical white tradition produced became in his later years a tool of the same state-capitalist system that had surveilled and suppressed the writers who wrote left material that Steinbeck had only approximated. That trajectory, from civic and social sympathy to Cold War collaboration is quintessential establishment biography. It’s the canonical tradition’s gravitational pull on a writer who approached the organic dispossessed position without fully occupying it, revealing who these writers really are — those who gesture for a time toward a full humanity without committing to it or becoming it. No social suppression was needed to destroy a Steinbeck, not when it could pull him into something more palatable to its ideological taste as the times were forcibly changed.

Why did Steinbeck approximate dispossessed literature in the first place, after his early pirate tale? Probably because unlike Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway, Steinbeck began publishing at the start of the Great Depression, when the left liberatory literary tradition was clearly the most viscerally and intellectually powerful tradition available.

Steinbeck’s limitations are not the limitations of formal fetish or aristocratic or other entitled evasion but the limitations of the sympathetic observer who cannot get inside the material. Hemingway’s minimalism is a stylistic and ideological approach that aestheticizes what should be exposed. Faulkner’s complexity is a way of not saying certain things directly while appearing to say everything that can be said. Steinbeck’s naturalism is an attempt to dramatize dispossession. It’s not organic and it’s not as counter-hegemonic as it could be, per Hugo, and so falls short of the achievements and import of the Big Bang, and of the people’s liberatory tradition in literature in general. Steinbeck’s naturalism learned little from the limited naturalism of the preceding decades, let alone from the socialist and proletarian literary uprising happening simultaneously, and nothing from the best of the Harlem Renaissance — all of which the literary establishment worked to bury, though Gold and McKay, Smedley and Hughes, Larsen and Thurman were there to be read by anyone paying attention, along with The Masses, The Liberator, the New Masses, The Crisis, and other notable “radical” literary and cultural, social and political journals, magazines, and newspapers.

For a brief four year window, Steinbeck tried to write of and on behalf of the dispossessed — as was all the proletarian rage at the time — and that gap between what he tried and what Gold and Smedley, McKay and Thurman, Hughes and Larsen, Tsiang and McNickle achieved immediately prior and concurrently is the most instructive measure of what the organic dispossessed position actually requires and what the sympathetic establishment observer, however sympathetic in intent, cannot provide — not unless one writes in the fully human and fully counter-hegemonic mode in the novel that has been achieved at least since the time of Victor Hugo in Les Misérables and has been typically belittled, misrepresented, and blocked by the establishment ever since.

Consider the great Russian novelists Tolstoy and Gorky in relation to Steinbeck and the Nobel Prize. Tolstoy, the greatest novelist of the 19th century by virtually universal critical consensus, was explicitly denied the Nobel because his later work turned toward anarchism, pacifism, and anti-state radicalism — the political direction that most closely anticipates the Big Bang tradition’s explicit structural indictment of oppressive systems, whatever the country. The Nobel committee’s Permanent Secretary pointed to Tolstoy’s politics as the reason for the denial, in language — “hostility to all forms of civilization” — that is the kind of language the canonical establishment has always used against the dispossessed tradition.

Gorky — the Russian novelist who most directly paralleled the American Big Bang tradition, who came out of proletarian dispossession, who dramatized working class and revolutionary consciousness with organic authority, was nominated five times for the Nobel in the late 1920s and early 1930s and never won. The committee chose Bunin over Gorky in 1933 on political grounds. A committee member noted openly that the king of Sweden could not give the award to a communist, and no wonder given that Russia had nationalized the Swedish Nobel family’s massive oil holdings in 1920. The Nobel Prize might be called the Imperial Oil Prize. The Big Bang window coincides with Gorky’s Nobel nominations being repeatedly denied for political reasons. Gorky, the greatest Russian organic dispossessed novelist, was repeatedly denied the Nobel in the same years as the Big Bang, while Lewis won for white middle class satire. The propagandistic imperial capitalist ideological suppression functions internationally at all times, during the Big Bang and throughout history.

Steinbeck winning the Nobel Prize is the reverse of Gorky’s not winning it. Steinbeck, the sympathetic civic establishment observer of the dispossessed, received the Nobel while Gorky writing in the organic dispossessed tradition received nothing. Steinbeck’s rightward turn helped confirm the establishment acceptability of the prize. The Nobel committee could reward the civic establishment tradition at a politically acceptable moment, safely distanced by decades from the radical cultural era that produced it. Steinbeck’s Depression-era work suggested the organic dispossessed position without being it, and his subsequent career showed that the gesture was not a permanent or fundamental political commitment.

Steinbeck was not awarded the Nobel because he turned right, though he might have been denied it if he had truly turned left. He was awarded it in 1962 primarily for The Grapes of Wrath and his Depression-era work, and the committee acknowledged at the time that his later work was weaker. The Nobel citation emphasized his “realistic and imaginative writing, combining as it does sympathetic humour and keen social perception.” The prize was retrospective recognition of his 1930s work, safely distant, the worst of the Great Depression long since overcome and the liberatory socialist uprising wholly suppressed. The prize culture gave its highest honor to this compromise choice in 1962 while the Big Bang tradition and its heirs remained entirely unrecognized, the Nobel going to a civic establishment novelist the committee privately considered inadequate rather than to anyone from the organic dispossessed tradition that had produced the greater literature thirty years earlier and was still producing it.

Nobel committee member Henry Olsson wrote privately that “there aren’t any obvious candidates for the Nobel prize and the prize committee is in an unenviable situation.” Steinbeck was described in the declassified documents as a compromise choice from a weak field. A Swedish newspaper called it “one of the Academy’s biggest mistakes.” The New York Times questioned why the prize went to a writer whose “limited talent is, in his best books, watered down by tenth-rate philosophising.” And Steinbeck himself, when asked if he deserved the Nobel, replied — “Frankly, no.”

Despite Steinbeck’s deep flaws, the Nobel committee could have done worse. They also could have done much better. Langston Hughes was a far more accomplished and vital choice due to the combination of his great poetry and novel. But the Red Scare, the Cold War, the blacklist, and the McCarthy persecution made Langston Hughes, unlike the rightward lurching Steinbeck, politically taboo.

The opening of The Grapes of Wrath:

To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifted the corn quickly and scattered weed colonies and grass along the sides of the roads so that the gray country and the dark red country began to disappear under a green cover. In the last part of May the sky grew pale and the clouds that had hung in high puffs for so long in the spring were dissipated. The sun flared down on the growing corn day after day until a line of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet. The clouds appeared, and went away, and in a while they did not try any more. The weeds grew darker green to protect themselves, and they did not spread any more. The surface of the earth crusted, a thin hard crust, and as the sky became pale, so the earth became pale, pink in the red country and white in the gray country.

The opening of In Dubious Battle:

The lights in the street outside came on, and the Neon restaurant sign on the corner jerked on and off, exploding its hard red light in the air. Into Jim Nolan’s room the sign threw a soft red light. For two hours Jim had been sitting in a small, hard rocking-chair, his feet up on the white bedspread. Now that it was quite dark, he brought his feet down to the floor and slapped the sleeping legs. For a moment he sat quietly while waves of itching rolled up and down his calves; then he stood up and reached for the unshaded light. The furnished room lighted up—the big white bed with its chalk-white spread, the golden-oak bureau, the clean red carpet worn through to a brown warp.

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The Great Gatsby (1925) — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Stepping back through time from the 1930s, you can see more of the suffocating constrictions that became celebrated as the models of the canon. Four short years before the literary Big Bang, Fitzgerald’s third novel The Great Gatsby (1925) was published, and far from immediately but eventually would be hailed as perhaps the most canonical America novel, the alleged Great American Novel. As I’ve detailed in previous posts, this was a falsely manufactured Cold War reputation. The moral limitations of a party-hard privileged writer with an all but banal patina to his works were aestheticized into tragic profundity and elevated to the summit of the American canon. Prominent writers such as legendary Baltimore iconoclast cultural and literary critic, H. L. Mencken and Fitzgerald’s otherwise supportive former Princeton classmate and leading canonical critic, Edmund Wilson, noted when Gatsby first appeared that the novel seemed obviously slight and frivolous. An all but passé tale of wealthy socialites and their affairs in a small corner of capitalism, a mild critique but also a glorification, inadvertent or otherwise, of the decadent upper slice of American society.

The Great Gatsby is a novel about a man who cannot grow up, written by a novelist who shared that incapacity. The canonical tradition’s elevation of that arrested development as tragic sensitivity is the whole ideological operation in miniature. It’s the entitled establishment culture glamorizing and elegizing itself. The American literary canon isn’t built for grown-ups with any collective consciousness of the world. It’s built for good little entitled imperialist cogs. Fitzgerald wrote almost exclusively about the wealthy and their hangers-on, their parties and their carelessness, their wild flailing destructive and haplessly romantic ways. He returns relentlessly to the beautiful young rich as the measure of human significance. It’s a failure to develop beyond a Princeton undergraduate’s awe at wealth and beauty. His story worlds are bounded by affluence in subject matter and in his moral and imaginative limits. The suffering in Fitzgerald is almost always the suffering of people who have too much or who want too much of what others themselves have too much.

What is almost entirely absent from Fitzgerald is the perspective of anyone for whom these are not the central questions of life: the poor, the working class, the racially excluded, the immigrants, let alone socialists, and revolutionaries. Myrtle Wilson and her garage-owner husband George in Gatsby are the closest Fitzgerald comes to working class characters in the novel, and their function in the story is essentially to be destroyed by the carelessness of the rich. Their inner lives remain thin compared to the elaborations of the privileged and the elite, Gatsby and Daisy and Nick.

At least Fitzgerald’s account of the American dream as illusion, his exposure of the carelessness and cruelty of the rich, is a critique of the class world he inhabited. Nick Carraway’s final disgust with the Buchanans, the illusory green light of some distant life that recedes as a hapless romantic reaches for it, the working class “valley of ashes” where the other half lives and die, does not celebrate privilege but serves as an elegy for the emptiness and destructiveness involved. Fitzgerald knew the rich were careless and destructive. He showed some of it exactingly and with moral feeling, but it’s an exploration that is extremely cramped and confined, parochial to privilege.

The valley of ashes and the people who live in it — the Wilsons, the workers, the poor — are moral backdrop for the drama of the privileged rather than subjects in their own right. The American dream’s failure is marked as tragedy for those who dreamed it, not as any revealing, moving, and dramatic exploration of the system that manufactures the dream — “that you have to be asleep to believe,” in the words of Malcom X — while grinding up the people in the valley below. Fitzgerald sees that these privileged lives are hollow and worse, but he does not dramatize the people of the larger gasping world who are struggling or being smashed by society, the masses of people. Smedley does. Hughes does. Gold does. McKay does. D’Arcy McNickle does too, as we’ll see. Thurman and Larsen do also, to a significant extent. To great effect, artistic and otherwise.

The great literary limitations of F. Scott Fitzgerald are the limitations of his class position and his failure to imaginatively transcend it. He could see the rot at the top but could not turn his eyes downward with any sustained curiosity or moral seriousness. The world below the party remains for Fitzgerald largely invisible, a backdrop of ash. That’s where most people actually live and struggle, destroyed not as much by romantic disappointment as by the grinding structures of capitalism and imperialism, racial penalties and bigotry of all kinds. He was a gifted elegist for a class that deserved no elegy, and his elevation to the summit of the American canon tells us less about his achievement than about the values of those who built the canon and what, and whom, they needed it to suppress — the dispossessed, the “radical” liberatory socialists, communists, politicized workers, the racially excluded and oppressed, minorities of all kinds, the novelists of the liberatory Big Bang who wrote with more range, more urgency, and more truth about the human world.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was deeply establishment in various ways, and even more deeply aspirational to the plutocrat elite — attending Princeton University, courting multiple rich young women and marrying the one who would have him, Zelda Sayer, after the success of his first novel, This Side of Paradise.

Zelda was born to the Southern wealthy elite. Her father, Anthony Dickinson Sayre was a leading state legislator and force of oppression, an Associate Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court who “was the legal architect who laid the foundation for the state’s discriminatory Jim Crow laws.” Zelda was descended from a family who were:

prominent slave-holders and outspoken defenders of the transatlantic slave trade before the American Civil War. [Zelda’s grandfather] Daniel Sayre served as the influential editor of The Montgomery Post, an Alabama newspaper described by historians as a propaganda outlet for the Southern Confederacy.

Zelda’s mother, Minerva Buckner “Minnie” Machen, was from an elite political family also, in Kentucky:

Zelda’s grandfather, Willis B. Machen, served in the Confederate Congress [and, post-Civil War, in the U.S. Congress]. Her father’s uncle was John Tyler Morgan, a Confederate general in the American Civil War and a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama. According to biographer Nancy Milford, “if there was a Confederate establishment in the Deep South, Zelda Sayre came from the heart of it.”

Fitzgerald’s father came from an established family in Montgomery County Maryland, adjacent to Washington D.C. Fitzgerald’s namesake was his distant cousin Francis Scott Key, author of the American National Anthem. Another distant cousin, Mary Surratt, was hanged in 1865 for conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. Fitzgerald romanticized his Maryland connections, his distant kinship with Francis Scott Key, his wife, and much else besides, not unlike Jay Gatsby’s romantic fixations in the famed novel. William Faulkner similarly mythologized his family’s slave-holding past — an overlooked deep connection between the two canonical giants. The romanticizing and the mythologizing are not merely aesthetic choices or fancy literary devices. They are lies told to oneself, the self-deception that makes public falsity possible and that gives it convincing emotional texture. You cannot romanticize the plantation or aestheticize grasping for the American Dream by the already privileged with full conscious awareness of what you are doing and why. Something worthy needs to be believed in before it can be made story. This is what racism and imperialism require of their most gifted literary apologists, a self-enchantment that protects entitled white consciousness from what full sight could not bear to see or reveal.

The most spectacular instance of this retrograde romance and mythologizing is Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936). It romanticized the plantation and the Confederacy so completely that it won the Pulitzer Prize. The same prize culture that ignored McKay, Hughes, Thurman, Larsen, Gold, Smedley, and others rewarded the most thoroughgoing celebration of the slave-holding South in American literary history. Through its film adaptation it shaped popular consciousness about slavery and Reconstruction for generations. Mitchell believed her story. That belief is what made it so infectious. The lie told first to oneself becomes the lie told to everyone. Gone With the Wind is the Lost Cause mythology in its most popular and most influential novelistic form. The sheer falsity: the Confederacy fighting not for slavery but for a noble way of life, Reconstruction as vindictive Yankee punishment, Black political participation as catastrophe, the restoration of white supremacy through violence as heroic civilizational defense. The novel sold thirty million copies. The film won eight Academy Awards. Hattie McDaniel won Best Supporting Actress as the first Black person to win an Oscar. She played Mammy, the devoted enslaved woman whose loyalty to her white mistress is the novel’s most fully realized Black characterization. The irony is almost too painful to name. And the Pulitzer Prize rewarded this celebration of the slave-holding South in the same decade that McKay, Hughes, Thurman, Larsen, Gold, Smedley, and others were being suppressed. The same prize culture functions similarly today — institutional, ideological, and consistently retrograde about what American literature is for and what it must not be.

Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Mitchell moved in the same class world and shared the same capacity for self-enchanting mythology about it. Fitzgerald transposed the Southern aristocracy he married into northward to Long Island and the Riviera, while Faulkner mythologized his family’s slave-holding past into baroque formal complexity, and Mitchell romanticized the plantation directly and most spectacularly of all. The self-deception, or at least the cultural alignment, ran in the same direction for all three. Before meeting Zelda, Fitzgerald served under Captain Dwight Eisenhower in the Army and apparently disliked him. This may say more about Fitzgerald’s alignment with the Southern aristocratic values he married into through Zelda Sayre of Alabama than about any principled political instinct. Eisenhower was no civil rights hero but he did send the 101st Airborne into Little Rock in 1957 to desegregate Central High School over the hostile resistance of the Arkansas governor. This was a more direct confrontation with Southern white supremacy than anything Fitzgerald apparently ever managed in his fiction or his life.

Fitzgerald lived in Baltimore from 1932 to summer 1936 where he spent time with V. F. Calverton, somewhat ironically given the politics, and Fitzgerald received many famous friends in Baltimore, including John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, Thomas Wolfe, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley. The entire canonical literary establishment seemed to pass through Baltimore visiting Fitzgerald while Calverton two miles away hosted and created a strong socialist alternative.

The Baltimore years were rough on Fitzgerald’s health and finances. Tender Is the Night (1934) sold poorly. Alcoholic and broke he left for Hollywood and died four years later. The social establishment he had courted all his life shunned him in death for the dissolute reputation of his novels and himself. The reckless privilege and raucous wealth that he had both lived and aestheticized bothered the respectable. There was:

the widespread perception of Fitzgerald as a libertine chronicler of rebellious youth and proselytizer of Jazz Age hedonism … the Baltimore Diocese refused his family permission to bury him at St. Mary’s Church in Rockville, Maryland.

The literary establishment would quickly come around, including him in the Armed Services Editions, unlike the great novelists of the dispossessed, and then methodically working him to the top of the literary canon. Fitzgerald could write a sentence, as can be seen below. His limitation was imaginative and ideological rather than purely technical.

Because Fitzgerald is such a fixation for so many, not least a certain kind of aspiring male writer, let’s say something on his behalf that is rarely said. Rather, let’s get a progressive literary critic of the time who was somewhat sympathetic to Fitzgerald to say it. Maxwell Geismar in The Last of the Provincials: The American Novel, 1915-1925, “F. Scott Fitzgerald: Orestes at the Ritz”: notes that in the late work of Fitzgerald, dead at forty-four, there

is an odd transformation for a writer who has clung to a feudal southern aristocracy when he wasn’t panting after a blond northern élite. It is a transformation which brings into focus the reversal of Fitzgerald’s values which is embodied in [Fitzgerald’s unfinished final novel] The Last Tycoon and for which his abrupt geographical reversal from east to west was the prelude. It is difficult to ignore Fitzgerald’s final stress on poverty as against wealth, on character as against charm, on energy and work as against grace and ease, and even on the alien toilers as against our native Princetonians.

This was the feudal Southern aristocracy Fitzgerald married into. Its values and romantic mythology were reproduced in his fiction among the wealthy of Long Island and the Riviera rather than honestly examined for what it was, though there may have been the beginnings of a shift in Fitzgerald’s focus by the end of his short life. While living with Zelda in Baltimore in the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression, and partaking in the literary salons in socialist critic V.F. Calverton’s home alongside Howard University professor and Harlem Renaissance figure Alain Locke, and others, Fitzgerald supposedly developed an interest in studying Marxism, even as he continued dramatizing the financial elite — Southern, Northern, then Hollywood. And so, Geismar continues:

Is there still one remaining constant in all this flux? Has Fitzgerald returned quite deliberately to this California scene for his last portrait of the ‘age of glamour’? Even the sparkling Hollywood décor, into which Scott puts his last impulse of enchantment, trembles under the reverberations of time and change. The writer for whom the revolutionary roar of Europe in 1919 could barely stir the drawn curtains of the Ritz, nor the rioting mob outside of Delmonico’s mar the light clat-clat of afternoon tea—this prime story teller of a boom-town America now speaks of the Bonus Army, of labor troubles and early Fascists, and of the rich who since 1933 ‘could only be happy alone together.’ …

This is the final step in the history of our writer’s partnership with the American rich—a dissolving partnership, as we’ve seen, and one that works its way from the top down: from Amory Blaine to James Gatz, the poor boy whose struggle to ape the élite first fully shows them up. … The writer who has fled throughout his life from any contact with a vulgar American social arrangement, has returned home to record its peak and its passing.

Geismar adds in passing:

And didn’t F. Scott Fitzgerald have more talent than the rest of the Younger Generation put together, as Gertrude Stein was reported to have said?

Maybe so, but talent only gets you so far. In any case, it was an establishment talent that was readily surpassed by the tremendous talent of the great writers of the dispossessed. It took Fitzgerald an entire privileged and ultimately tragic wrecked life to begin to approach what writers like Agnes Smedley and Michael Gold knew in their bones seemingly from the start and dramatized in staggering detail with sometimes unbearably compelling dramatic command. All three writers were born within four years of each other, though into very different circumstances that would follow them for life. Fitzgerald was not rare in his talent by the standards of the dispossessed. Smedley and Gold too could turn a phrase, capture a scene, and sketch an epic, packing a verbal punch in creating a vivid world with indelible characters — only more so, and with more truth and more urgency and more of the actual human world in view. And yet — for some reason — Smedley and Gold’s masterful novels would be dismissed and repressed and Fitzgerald’s Gatsby would become the Great American Novel in a wild and telling and purposefully constructed inversion of reality.

If anything at all makes sense in this vein, the Great American Epic of Novels is collectively expressed in the landmark novels by Gold, Smedley, McKay, Hughes, Larsen, Thurman, Tsiang, and McNickle. Read these Big Bang novels, and the very tightly related, including the two additional 1928 novels by Larsen and McKay, ten novels total, for a total reorientation and internalization of the true American canon in the novel and literature. It’s the canon of the dispossessed against the onslaught of imperialism — ongoing — and the greatest fruit and inheritance of American literature. Compared to which the establishment lifted and heralded Gatsby is a lesser American novel.

The opening of The Great Gatsby:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

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Two international novels that should join the historical moment’s Big Bang explosion of literary novels are Erich Maria Remarque’s German antiwar novel All Quiet on the Western Front and on the North American continent along the US border Mariano Azuela’s Los de Abajo (The Underdogs), both appearing in English translation in 1929. (And additionally, Remarque’s Western Front sequel, The Road Back, published in 1930.) The literary explosion in the novel of 1929-1930 was not merely an American phenomenon but part of a global moment in which the dispossessed increasingly attempted to express themselves, their experiences, their views, their conditions in novelistic form. Remarque does with psychological realism and social condemnation in regard to the horror and catastrophe of World War One what the American dispossessed novels do for class and race, gender and collective consciousness in the diverse and brutal society of America. These novels dramatize human experience and consciousness to get at what matters most — what is gripping, urgent, wrenchingly human and inhuman. These novels reveal collective historical experience through individual consciousness with emotional directness without mystifying in ways that the canonical tradition pretends is depth. Azuela, writing about the Mexican Revolution in 1915 and first translated into English in 1929, adds a revolutionary populist Latin American consciousness to the mix that anticipates the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s — the celebrated explosion of García Márquez, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, and Fuentes — but did so three decades earlier, from below rather than from establishment literary culture, and without receiving anything like the same recognition.

The Latin American boom, an extraordinary eruption of novelistic ambition and international recognition that included Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Carlos Fuentes’s The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Green House (1966), Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1963), and José Donoso’s work among others, unfolded in the same decade that the Cuban Revolution of 1959 electrified political and cultural life across Latin America and beyond. The relationship was causal among other things — another socialist uprising of the dispossessed, a diverse upsurge against empire, spurring great literature. Fuentes and Cortázar were already deep into the work that would become their landmark novels before the revolution succeeded. The literary energies the Boom drew on — its mythic and historical sweep, its fusion of the personal and the collective, its willingness to confront imperialism, class, race, and power while remaining aesthetically serious — had been present in Latin American fiction for decades. Azuela had done it in 1915. But the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel and Raúl Castro and Che Guevara transformed the atmosphere in which these novels would be received. It made publishers and critics in Europe and North America suddenly willing to treat Latin America as a site of world-historical consequence. It made them willing in ways they had never been for Azuela, or for the diverse and liberatory novelists of the American Big Bang. What changed between 1929 and the 1960s was not the basic literary ambition or artistic achievement of the novelists but world history advancing along liberatory socialist and diverse paths. Personal and cultural, social and institutional, geographical and geopolitical situations and forces determined which literary ambitions would be celebrated and which would be buried.

The Cuban Revolution of 1959 created enormous international political and cultural interest in Latin America generally, which gave the literary moment a geopolitical context that made European and North American publishers and critics receptive in ways they might not otherwise have been. In other words, the Latin American literary boom rode the political wave of left intellectual interest in Latin America — thanks to the Cuban revolution and America’s intense opposition to it and attack against it — before the literary boom became the broader canonical and a seemingly purely literary phenomenon. For Latin American and global left intellectuals at the time the Cuban Revolution proved that American imperial dominance in the hemisphere could be successfully defied, a live example of what resistance could achieve, which electrified political and cultural life across Latin America and beyond and created the receptive atmosphere in which the literary boom flourished.

Decades earlier in America the successes of the socialist and communist organizing and uprisings coupled with the Harlem Renaissance had created a similar but heavily suppressed populist literary explosion, best evidenced by the dispossessed novels of the Big Bang that dramatized and expressed American life in revealing ways, the diverse populist people’s consciousnesses, combining the novel’s formal ambition with psychological and socio-political intelligence and awareness, centering the lives of the dispossessed with full artistic force, confronting empire and racism and class exploitation directly — in 1928, 1929, and 1930 especially. McKay’s internationalism from below, Smedley’s fusion of the workers and the revolutionary, the personal and the political, Hughes’s depiction of Black American life, Gold’s collective portrait of immigrant poverty. These powerful sensibilities anticipated the Latin American boom’s central achievements by decades. The difference is that the Latin American boom was celebrated and canonized globally while the Big Bang Six were suppressed and buried. Same literary-historical impulse, radically different institutional fate for trying to create and distribute the people’s literature in the very heart of Empire.

In Barcelona, Spain the roles of publisher Seix Barral, editor Carlos Barral, and literary agent Carmen Balcells were crucial. Balcells and her agency represented most of the major Latin American boom writers and engineered their European publication and visibility in ways that required significant institutional infrastructure — especially a network of major publishers with whom Balcells negotiated aggressive and strategic translation rights. The Latin American literary boom was institutionally built, while the American populist literary boom of the socialist era and Big Bang was actively suppressed — ignored, smeared, or criminalized by the establishment. Balcells managed the Latin American writers’ reputations and public profiles in ways that created the sense of a movement, so the boom was partly a publishing and marketing construction as well as a real literary eruption. Framing several writers as a collective phenomenon rather than isolated individuals gave each one more cultural momentum than they would have had alone. Balcells worked the existing infrastructure of international literary prizes, review culture, festival circuits, and the academy in ways that parallel, at a far grander scale, what Malcolm Cowley did for Faulkner with the Portable series that helped gain Faulkner the Nobel Prize in literature within four years of publication.

Balcells represented six Nobel Prize winners: Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Camilo José Cela, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz — a concentration of laureates under a single agent almost without parallel in literary history. Balcells shaped the international reception of an entire literary tradition across several decades, with significant help from Carlos Barral and Seix Barral publishing.

The contrast with the American Big Bang writers is stark. Unlike the Latin American boom writers, and unlike American establishment favorites Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Wolfe — Gold, Smedley, McKay, Hughes, Thurman, Larsen, Tsiang, McNickle, and others had no equivalent agent, editor, publisher, or literary prizes that worked strategically on their behalf, not at any level, national or international. No one engineered their collective publication and translations, framed them as a movement, or connected them to prize culture. In fact, the culturally revolutionary Big Bang novelists were subject initially and over time to the exact opposite treatment, with most of the American surveillance and police state and the literary establishment pitted actively against them.

Several of Balcells’s Nobel writers managed to be politically “radical” and still be celebrated — and the reason is revealing. Neruda was a Communist Party member; García Márquez was a lifelong friend of Castro and sympathizer with the Cuban Revolution; Asturias was a fierce critic of United Fruit and American imperialism in Guatemala. The difference is that their radicalism was geographically and culturally distant enough from American domestic politics to be aestheticized and celebrated rather than suppressed and punished. Latin American radicalism could be made exotic and literary. American radicalism had to be destroyed. And this pattern continues today in American publishing and prize giving, a fact that needs to be overcome and a topic that could make for a book in itself — or maybe this too is it.

The conscious institutional construction of the Boom was vulnerable to political fracture in ways that organic literary movements are not as much. In 1971, Vargas Llosa and other writers criticized Castro when the Cuban government briefly imprisoned the poet Herberto Padilla for 37 days in 1971 and made him sign a confession of being a counterrevolutionary. With the Latin American literary writers now politically divided, the movement was split and weakened. The Cuban Revolution had been the geopolitical backdrop that made the literary project feel historically urgent rather than merely aesthetic. Once that context became the source of open conflict among the writers, the collective identity collapsed, and they seemed more like individual authors again rather than a big and mighty movement.

In America, the people’s novelists of the Big Bang were never recognized as such, as constituting any kind of movement at all, let alone promoted as any kind of boom. They were ignored, maligned, and otherwise attacked. Today, nearly a century after the fact, we should both recognize and recommend them as the epicenter of the literary renaissance in the novel that they were — diverse and liberatory, no less — a moment without parallel in American literary history.

If you assault and destroy “radicalism” — enlightened active consciousness — you destroy progressive populism and liberatory socialism, and if you destroy that you destroy the people, and if you destroy the people you destroy their literature, which is their ability and their achievement in expressing and communicating themselves and the world. And if the people somehow mightily manage to create their own literature anyway, then the conquering state-capitalist empire needs to destroy that as quickly and totally as possible and reverse-engineer the process. Destroy the people’s literature — smear it as inartistic propaganda and criminalize its authors — to destroy the people’s best sense of themselves, to destroy their liberatory populist powers, to destroy their capacity to organize or even to live, to destroy their consciousness and intelligence, emotional and intellectual, to deny their own experience, to warp, to disappear, to discredit it all, to destroy their ability to ever rise again in the eternal quest to become fully human.

Which side of the line are you on? The empire of destruction, or the most creative and liberatory, diverse and just side of the people?

Mariano Azuela’s sixth novel Los de Abajo follows Demetrio Macías, a Native Mexican peasant who joins the Revolution after Federal troops destroy his home. Demetrio rises through the fighting to the rank of general, and is eventually killed in the same mountain pass where his journey began. Written in 1915 while Azuela was serving as a doctor with Pancho Villa’s forces in revolutionary battles, the novel was published in fragmentary form in a Texas border newspaper, El Paso del Norte, after being written in El Paso during his temporary exile, then essentially forgotten until its rediscovery and translation into English in 1929.

Los de Abajo is the foundational novel of the Mexican Revolution that influenced other suppressed and dismissed Mexican novels of the revolution published about the same time as the American populist literary Big Bang, including Martín Luis Guzmán’s El águila y la serpiente (1928) and Nellie Campobello’s “proletarian” Cartucho (1931) and Rafael F. Muñoz’s Vámonos con Pancho Villa (1931). Like Azuela, Muñoz too was forced by the revolution into temporary exile in America. Los de Abajo also influenced Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955), which Gabriel García Márquez has famously cited as a strong influence upon his own groundbreaking novels.

The prose of Los de Abojo is spare and episodic. The violence, everything, is portrayed without glamour, to say the least, including the novel opening which dramatizes the barbaric merciless shooting of a beloved pet dog, to the distress, though much abbreviated, of its owner. Hard moments within the revolution are viewed without illusion. The men fight because they fight, it seems, the ideology trailing, after the initial cause, the original dispossession. The rugged land and rough bodies and actions are shown dynamically for what they are. What Azuela evidently deplores by his depiction, writing from his active role inside the Revolution rather than as mere observer, is when revolutionary violence transforms into destruction or personal enrichment and barbaric purposes beyond anything that would justify it. The people who are problematically impacted in the chaos are some of the same dispossessed people the Revolution otherwise attempts to liberate. Los de Abajo and the related other marginalized Mexican revolutionary and populist novels forerun by decades the populist expression that the great Latin American novelists would make central. The appearance of Los de Abajo in English in 1929 during the American Big Bang in literary novels added a revolutionary consciousness from below the Rio Grande to a moment in American literary culture that was also exploding with voices from below. Los de Abajo shows the revolutionary power of the dispossessed while breaking any romantic illusions, and the best of the American Big Bang novels do something similar. They break psychological and sociological illusions and from the fragments and the ashes create greater and higher consciousness and insight, sometimes reaching revolutionary experiences and possibilities and understandings that are the great liberatory stories and realities of the time and all time.

The opening of Los de Abajo:

“That’s no animal, I tell you! Listen to the dog barking! It must be a human being.”

The woman stared into the darkness of the sierra.

“What if they’re soldiers?” said a man, who sat Indian-fashion, eating, a coarse earthenware plate in his right hand, three folded tortillas in the other.

The woman made no answer, all her senses directed outside the hut. The beat of horses’ hoofs rang in the quarry nearby. The dog barked again, louder and more angrily.

“Well, Demetrio, I think you had better hide, all the same.”

Stolidly, the man finished eating; next he reached for a cantaro and gulped down the water in it; then he stood up.

“Your rifle is under the mat,” she whispered.

A tallow candle illumined the small room. In one corner stood a plow, a yoke, a goad, and other agricultural implements. Ropes hung from the roof, securing an old adobe mold, used as a bed; on it a child slept, covered with gray rags.

Demetrio buckled his cartridge belt about his waist and picked up his rifle. He was tall and well built, with a sanguine face and beardless chin; he wore shirt and trousers of white cloth, a broad Mexican hat and leather sandals.

With slow, measured step, he left the room, vanishing into the impenetrable darkness of the night.

Leaving North American and Latin American literature for the briefest of moments, we turn to Erich Maria Remarque’s antiwar novel All Quiet on the Western Front, which like Mariano Azuela’s revolutionary novel Los de Abajo also appeared in English translation in 1929.

The psychological antiwar realism of this famous World War One novel follows Paul Bäumer, a young German soldier, from his enlistment through the Western Front trenches to his death in October 1918, on a day so quiet that the army communiqué reports only that there is nothing new to report.

All Quiet is one of the definitive antiwar novels of the twentieth century, not because it is the most formally ambitious but because it is so pointedly normatively critical, showing the experience of industrial warfare by way of a young man destroyed by it, without heroism, without nationalism, without the consolation of special meaning. The prose is direct and emotionally honest. Remarque shows each death specifically enough that the reader grieves each friend individually rather than as statistics of industrial war. Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth expresses similar emotional directness in the face of forces that systematically destroy individuals — not the weaponry of conventional war but the grinding daily violence of poverty, racism, and sexual exploitation in a systematically bigoted and impoverished American society — predatory capitalism — that produces its own dissociative trauma and its own relentless despair and accumulation of loss, like a plague. In All Quiet the boys — the young men, the soldiers — are formed by a culture that sent them to be destroyed. Their bodies, their minds, their emotions, their relationship to the civilian world they came from — all destroyed, whether they return or not.

All Quiet was published in Germany in 1929, translated immediately, and was a global sensation. The novel was banned and burned by the Nazis when they came to power in the 1930s because they understood what the antiwar novel meant and threatened. Its appearance in the same year as the unacknowledged and unheralded American literary explosion helps make this 1929 culturally critical, populist, and politically incisive moment international and global in import. The dispossessed found form across languages and continents and wars and societies simultaneously. The American establishment showed its duplicitous two-faced nature by pointing its bloody finger at Germany for the horrific and damning contents of World War One, while passively and actively burying the establishment-damning contents of the suppressed six novels of the American literary Big Bang.

The opening of All Quiet on the Western Front:

We are at rest five miles behind the front. Yesterday we were relieved, and now our bellies are full of beef and haricot beans. We are satisfied and at peace. Each man has another mess-tin full for the evening; and, what is more, there is a double ration of sausage and bread. That puts a man in fine trim. We have not had such luck as this for a long time. The cook with his carroty head is begging us to eat; he beckons with his ladle to every one that passes, and spoons him out a great dollop. He does not see how he can empty his stew-pot in time for coffee. Tjaden and Müller have produced two wash-basins and had them filled up to the brim as a reserve. In Tjaden this is voracity, in Müller it is foresight. Where Tjaden puts it all is a mystery, for he is and always will be as thin as a rake.

What’s more important still is the issue of a double ration of smokes. Ten cigars, twenty cigarettes, and two quids of chew per man; now that is decent. I have exchanged my chewing tobacco with Katczinsky for his cigarettes, which means I have forty altogether. That’s enough for a day.

It is true we have no right to this windfall. The Prussian is not so generous. We have only a miscalculation to thank for it.

Fourteen days ago we had to go up and relieve the front line. It was fairly quiet on our sector, so the quartermaster who remained in the rear had requisitioned the usual quantity of rations and provided for the full company of one hundred and fifty men. But on the last day an astonishing number of English field-guns opened up on us with high-explosive, drumming ceaselessly on our position, so that we suffered heavily and came back only eighty strong.

V.F. Calverton, a Johns Hopkins University graduate, ran his racially diverse cultural and literary magazine The Modern Quarterly from Baltimore, where it grew out of the gatherings he held in his home, eventually expanding to include a New York office. The magazine ran from 1923 to 1933, then continued as The Modern Monthly from 1933 until Calverton’s death in 1940. In the mid-1930s he became friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald, who lived in Baltimore when his wife Zelda was treated at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Zelda called Calverton the “community communist.” Fitzgerald and Calverton would die a month apart, ages 44 and 40, in 1940 on opposite sides of the country. The seventeen-year run of Calverton’s magazine began two years after he graduated from Johns Hopkins, ran through the literary Big Bang of 1929-1930 at full strength, and began fading in the political repression of the mid-1930s, dying with Calverton in 1940 when the institutions that would harden the canonical dominance of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Wolfe were consolidating their grip.

That Calverton published under a pseudonym is itself evidence of the suppression:

…in 1923, when Goetz, the son of middle-class, East Baltimore Germans, set out to call his new magazine the Radical Quarterly, [the] title alone was likely to cost him and his wife, Helen Letzer, their jobs as public school teachers. So he became Calverton; she became Ruth Merdon; and the magazine, the Modern Quarterly.

Though a socialist, V. F. Calverton was a traditional rather than organic intellectual in the Gramscian sense — another of the most important and most thoroughly forgotten figures in American literary and cultural criticism. Calverton’s 1929 anthology of Black literature was a major milestone, and his landmark The Liberation of American Literature (1932) is one of the most ambitious attempts to write a comprehensive Marxist literary history of America, arguing that American literature had been systematically distorted by colonialism and European influence — including by neglecting Black authors — in ways that prevented American writers from fully engaging with American social reality.

Calverton occupied a position between the left and the establishment, publishing a wide range of figures in his Modern journal and corresponding with Maxwell Perkins, the editor at Scribner’s of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe. Scribner’s published Calverton’s Marxist literary history at the same time that Maxwell Perkins was establishing the canonical white male establishment dominance of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe. The same publisher simultaneously financed the critique of canonical distortion and engineered the distortion being critiqued.

Maxwell Perkins was as establishment as it was possible to get. He was the grandson of William M. Evarts — U.S. Secretary of State, U.S. Attorney General, U.S. Senator from New York, and founder of the Yale Literary Magazine (1836).1 William M. Evarts was himself the grandson of Roger Sherman:

…the only person to sign all four great state papers of the United States: the Continental Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. He also signed the 1774 Petition to the King.

Archibald Cox was Maxwell Perkins’s nephew. They spent summers together on the family Evarts estate in Windsor, Vermont. Archibald Cox was

…an American legal scholar who served as U.S. Solicitor General under President John F. Kennedy and as a special prosecutor during the Watergate scandal. During his career, he was a pioneering expert on labor law and was also an authority on constitutional law. The Journal of Legal Studies has identified Cox as one of the most cited legal scholars of the 20th century.

While the uber-patrician Maxwell Perkins was canonizing a very white male entitled establishment type of American literature, V.F. Calverton was cultivating and accounting for a very different, far more diverse, liberatory, and populist American literary tradition from a rowhouse in Baltimore.2

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2

From The Liberation of American Literature (1932):

Genuine proletarian criticism has seldom sought to deny the importance of literary values because of its desire for social significances. On the contrary, except in the United States, revolutionary critics have often been harder taskmasters from the point of literary quality than aesthetic critics….

The revolutionary critic should demand as much of the art he endorses as the reactionary [critic]. No revolutionary critic, for example, should deny that art in itself, in whatever form, is a trade just as pottery-making is, and as a trade it has its technique which has to be mastered if that which is produced is to be worthwhile. Revolutionary art has to be good art first before it can have deep meaning, just as apples in a revolutionary country as well as in a reactionary country have to be good apples before they can be eaten with enjoyment. The fact that the pottery or the apples are the products of a revolutionary culture—that is, made or grown by revolutionists—does not itself, or by any kind of special magic, make them good. It simply gives them a new form of ideological identification… [Great revolutionary] films are great not because they are [only progressive in ideology] but because they are great first in their formal organization, and then greater still because of the social purpose which they serve.

The revolutionary proletarian critic does not aim to underestimate literary craftsmanship. What he contends is simply that literary craftsmanship is not enough. The craftsmanship must be utilized to create objects of revolutionary meaning. Only through this synthesis does the revolutionary critic believe that art can serve its most important purpose today. Revolutionary meanings without literary craftsmanship constitute as hopeless a combination from the point of view of the radical critic as literary craftsmanship without revolutionary purpose. If proletarian literature fails in so many instances in America, it is not because it is propagandistic—most of the literature of the world has been propagandistic in one way or another, including even that of William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw—but because it is lacking in qualities of craftsmanship.

In a word, the revolutionary critic does not believe that we can have art without craftsmanship; what he does believe is that, granted the craftsmanship, our aim should be to make art serve man as a thing of action and not man serve art as a thing of escape.

Proletarian writers are not necessarily proletarians…but they are writers who are imbued with a proletarian ideology instead of a bourgeois one. They are writers who have adopted the revolutionary point of view of the proletarian ideology in their work. That often they fail in such expression is inevitable in a transitional stage of society in which we are living in today. This much should be clear, however, and that is that proletarian writers are not to be confused with literary rebels. Literary rebels believe in revolt in literature; left-wing, that is proletarian, writers believe in revolt in life. The literary rebels, for example, who became the advocates of free verse as opposed to conventional verse must not be associated with proletarian writers, who are opposed to the society in which we live and aim to devote their literature to its transformation. Proletarian writers, then, are more interested in social revolt than in literary revolt. As a group they are convinced that present-day industrial society is based upon exploitation and injustice; that it creates distress and misery for the many and brings happiness only to the few; that its dedication to the ideal of profit instead of use is destructive of everything fine and inspiring in life; and that until its private-property basis is destroyed and replaced by the social control of all property, the human race will never be able to escape the horrors of unemployment, poverty, and war.

More than that, proletarian writers believe that their literature can serve a greater purpose only when it contributes, first, toward the destruction of present-day society, and, second, toward the creation of a new society which will embody…a social, instead of an individualistic ideal. Unlike Ibsen, they do not ask questions and then refuse to answer them. Unlike the iconoclasts, they are not content to tear down the idols and stop there. Their aim is to answer questions as well as ask them, and to provide a new order to replace an old one. Their attitude, therefore, is a positive instead of a negative one (459-462).

A Farewell to Arms — Ernest Hemingway

Though having praised Michael Gold’s work in a Guggenheim recommendation years earlier, Ernest Hemingway famously told a receptionist at Gold’s The Daily Worker office in 1946 to convey a message: “Tell Mike Gold that Ernest Hemingway says he should go fuck himself.” This occurred after Gold criticized Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), calling it “painfully fair to fascists” and accusing it of downplaying class struggle in the Spanish Civil War.

Hemingway’s 1929 Big Bang novel A Farewell to Arms follows Frederic Henry, an American ambulance officer in the Italian campaign of World War One, through his wounding, his love affair with the English nurse Catherine Barkley, and his desertion during a retreat. The prose is the most controlled and stripped of any novel in this 1929-1930 grouping. It uses short declarative sentences, repetition, and emotion conveyed through surface details and gesture, much withheld, a conscious adoption of newspaper styling that Hemingway learned on the job as reporter and applied to his fiction.

The novel’s limitation, its method and approach, causes Catherine Barkley to be mainly a projection of Frederic’s need rather than an independent consciousness. The war exists as an existential condition rather than as the product of specific political and economic forces, and the stark bare ending, a man walking back to a hotel in the dark in the rain after the death of his beloved, achieves its effect by suppressing rather than elaborating on the grief it contains. It’s a novel of alternating flat description and flat dialogue. It’s mannered — this deliberately narrow emotional and political range and literary style.

The problem with Hemingway’s minimalist or miniaturist “showing” or declarative technique is that once you get beyond a brief length like his stellar short story “Hills Like White Elephants” it often lands flat, reads like barely inflected information giving, which readers often associate with “telling”. The thing is to be dynamic whether showing or telling and poor Hemingway too often acts like he is willfully against being dynamic, as if priding in the reportorial, in a clichéd truncated supposedly objective style. This is a purposefully very limiting kind of consciousness. And so his novels feel reported, performative, mannered, gutted, per the house formula, rather than novel and expansive of consciousness and apprehension of the greater world. Read A Farewell to Arms and you can feel your IQ plunge, which is the way the masters of the world want it for people trying to know the world, themselves, and all the untold possibilities. It’s a kind of plutocrat news. Not very enlightening or revealing.

Victor Hugo used clipped prose with much more appeal and expansive effect in parts of Les Misérables expressing a wide variety of consciousnesses, from the heights of society to its depths. Plus, the prose often luxuriates and sprawls in Hugo, always to potent point in every way imaginable — expansive in intellect, experience, morality and spirituality, psychology, sociology, rhetoric, politics, history, and so on. The stoic stripped prose of Hemingway became a kind of toxic preoccupation in the literary establishment in future years, not least in the severe extent of arch-establishment Knopf editor Gordon Lish’s interventions in the establishment-celebrated short stories of Raymond Carver, fully documented when the original manuscripts were made available. The word “butchered” is not too strong. Lish cut Carver’s stories sometimes by more than half, removed explanatory and emotional passages, hardened the endings into the famously abrupt and withholding conclusions that became the signature of what was called minimalism, and in some cases rewrote sentences and passages. Lish cut much of the fuller humanity, also society, out of Carver’s work. The collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), which established Carver’s reputation and helped defined a cultural understanding of what the American short story could be or should be, was in several of its stories, and arguably on whole, more Lish’s work than Carver’s as final published text.

When Carver’s original versions were eventually published readers could see directly what had been removed. The original stories were warmer, more emotionally explicit, more willing to let characters explain themselves and feel things openly. They were closer to a Victor Hugo or Stephen Crane1 emotional sweep and transparency than to the cold minimalist aesthetic that Lish’s cutting produced and that the literary establishment celebrated as Carver’s signature achievement.

The minimalist aesthetic that dominated some of the swaths of American literary fiction and the MFA system, possibly because it seemed so basic to teach, the aesthetic that is in many ways the pedagogical and socio-pathological heir of Cold War anti-populist, capitalist literary ideology, the crimped emotionally suppressed or suddenly epiphanic story, turned out not to be even the authentic aesthetic or normative expression of one of the supposedly leading writers who famously helped propagate it in the early 1970s against the grain of the new liberatory political and multicultural explosion in literature. The Carver minimalism that countless MFA students were often encouraged to emulate and that sometimes defined what serious American short fiction was supposed to sound like was basically the creation of the lingering Hemingway legacy and establishment teachers and editors, including an editor whose interventions the writer himself was angered by and eventually moved away from. And it was minimalization of full consciousness and social comprehension as much as a minimalist prose style, as the canon-making magazines and publishing houses continued to entrench mainly establishment white culture, stories and novels that were largely retrograde or stagnant in consciousness and experience, let alone in liberatory culture, politics, and social perspective. It was minimalism of mind and heart, gut and politics, and society and social engagement, as much as style. In fact, far more so.

Carver’s later work, the stories collected after his break with Lish, is warmer and more emotionally open, closer to his original manuscripts, and richer and more complete as human expression, more socially conscious. It remains less celebrated than the Lish-shaped early work, which shows the essence of the ideology that the literary establishment has long preferred, that imaginative writers almost not speak, that they express minimally, with intense psychological and emotional, cultural and political constriction. Don’t rock the boat. Be emotionally cold and generally oblivious to the great epic matters of life and you may be reproduced and rewarded. Or go crazy wild in postmodernism and fracture all meaning — that’s fine too. The ruling class, the pillaging plutocracy, can live with that lack of structural insight, no problem. And so the owners and their editors give both minimalism and supposed maximalism their accommodationist stamp of approval.

The Lish-Carver relationship is a minor model of the larger process of the establishment perversion and butchery of the American literary canon, the shaping of an authentic voice by an institutional intermediary, a block and throttle, in ways that buttress certain aesthetic and ideological controls, the removal of emotional warmth and political context in favor of a cool surface of unknowingness that the establishment can celebrate as sophisticated through subsequent canonization. It’s a constricted and gutted institutional product, not an authentic or expansive human original. What Lish did to Carver’s stories in miniature is partly what the Cold War literary establishment did to the American literary tradition as a whole, vaunting the often almost childish reportorial style of Ernest Hemingway and cutting the warmth, the knowledge, the experience — hardening the surface, removing the explanatory emotional and social and political insight and understanding, and presenting the resulting deformed novel as the highest achievement of the form. It’s kind of gross in its way. And boring. And stupid. Mendacious. Suffocating. Carried out by an ideologically rigid system that wittingly and wittingly selects its witting and unwitting think-alike ideologues to perpetuate itself and the ruling order, unless forced to expand in bits and pieces, sometimes tokenized and tightly restricted still.

Hemingway’s limits are structural and ideological, writ large and small. The clipped coldness and emotional reticence that make him distinctive also make him mannered and vacuous in various ways. The method requires a narrow emotional, social, and philosophical range that may work for trauma and masculine stoicism and simple social concerns but cannot accommodate women or men as full consciousnesses, or society itself, at least not in Hemingway’s hands. Character is gutted. Class and economics as structural forces are invisible. The material environments and structures producing suffering — or even the psychological ones — go unexplored and unexposed. Racial matters are almost entirely absent. Joy seems nearly impossible in the Hemingway style or aesthetic. Something is oppressive but what? Comedy is a reach. Compare Hemingway to McKay, Gold, and Smedley — or even to Fitzgerald — and Hemingway is a mannered writer, often seemingly willfully dull, normatively limited to the point of not merely ho-hum but actively obscurant. An exploitative establishment naturally gravitates to such a voice that sees and feels and reveals what the entitled establishment allows to be seen and felt and known and nothing more.

Dos Passos and Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe — the latter three sharing the same editor, Maxwell Perkins, and publisher, Scribner’s — are peas of a pod, each the more formally self-conscious version of Dreiser, Anderson, Sinclair, Steinbeck, and Norris, to limiting effect. Meanwhile McKay, Gold, Smedley, Thurman, and Hughes cut a far more robust populist, human, and social swath than all of them, closer in spirit and in social scope to the internationalist, decolonial, and multicultural literature that would explode in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, partly embraced though often fighting the stagnant, repressed, and repressive establishment all the way.

In New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties, progressive literary critic Maxwell Geismar gives his impression of Hemingway in Madrid, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War:

We walked through the streets late one inky night, with Martha Gellhorn, and he said there were two kinds of men: one kind carried the parts of the machine guns and set them up; the other fired the gun and got the glory. The carriers, he said, had the right to share the glory, should get more than fifty per cent because they did the work that made the firing possible. Without them, the firer might as well stick his finger though the crook of a jug of Scotch. Regardless of many an apocryphal story about him and his egotism, his high-handed treatment of his peers, he was a simple man with a big heart. As simple as that.

Geismar got Hemingway to write for the Communist cultural journal New Masses after the 1934 hurricane that “drowned some 400 World War I veterans working on a federal project for the jobless in Florida” where Hemingway lived near. And in 1939 Geismar again got him to do a piece on the anniversary of the Lincoln Brigade in Spain that fought the fascists, but later Hemingway told Geismar:

…with an embarrassed laugh that he could never become a Marxist, it was not his style of thought and life; he was too much of an individualist. He said he respected Marxist as a fighting man, having seen his bravery in battle. But he could never take Marx. He said facetiously that he could not read the old Moor (I do not know where he learned that that was the soubriquet Marx’s family endowed Marx with because he was swarthy). “I can’t read the Moor,” Hemingway said, “he could only spoil my style. Pretty soon I’d be saying things like ‘surplus value,’ absolute and relative impoverishment of the proletariat,’ ‘alienation,’ ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’” He said every writer fashions the reader in his own image, that is the price one pays for buying a book. He feared that the mighty Moor would color his vocabulary, and he would prefer to keep his own, thank you. He admitted to an inheritance from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and a few things from Gertrude Stein. Year later I visited his home in Cuba—deeded by him in his will to its people, after the revolution. I went through his private library, the biggest in the land. In a place of honor on the shelves, were the earmarked works of Flaubert and Stendhal. The crystal style of these Frenchmen, the idiomatic, earthy and unparalleled colloquialism of Mark Twain, which conveyed his humanism seemed to be the seedbed of Hemingway’s “lean” style.

Or was it more reportorial? Far too lean, in my opinion, with little of the life of Twain2 and far too much the wooden repetitive manner of Stein — flat, flat, flat. Clearly no reading of Marx by the great socialist novelists Smedley, Gold, Hughes, and McKay hurt their powerful prose styles in the slightest. What jumps out at you in Geismar’s reflections here on Hemingway is how clichéd Hemingway’s thoughts seem. And not only clichéd but otherwise limited. So it is with the prose of his novels. Say what you will about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fixations with the wealthy, or with his aestheticism and weak leanings on symbolism, he could write rings around the choppy minimalism of Ernest Hemingway. That said, there’s something in the careful stripped sentence that can seem appealing in small doses, until you realize that the appeal is mostly the promise of meaning rather than meaning itself. Far too little bang for the buck, style and content both.

The opening of A Farwell to Arms:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees and beyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare. There was fighting in the mountains and at night we could see the flashes from the artillery. In the dark it was like summer lightning, but the nights were cool and there was not the feeling of a storm coming.

William Faulkner’s limits are different than Hemingway’s but similarly aligned. His elaborate Yoknapatawpha County mythology may reward focused reading for some, though it can be pointlessly exclusionary in some of its fanciful complexity, and aestheticizing to nowhere, or to historical and social coverup. Faulkner’s technical achievement is wildly overrated. His writing and obsessions typically come across as mannered and juvenile, and like Henry James he chews far more than he bites off. Yoknapatawpha is Chickasaw for “split land” though Faulkner said it meant something different, “water flows slow through flat land,” which shows exactly how honest and perceptive of history and society, people and consciousness Faulkner intended his novels to be. Faulkner seemed to live to deceive and distort, a notorious liar. He had and he expressed very much a supremacist mindset, in his literature and otherwise. He is the cultural phenomenon behind a white supremacist like Trump that currently rules the most powerful empire in the world.

Race is present in The Sound and the Fury but Black consciousness is viewed from outside, serving the white narrative rather than inhabited from within — nowhere near the depth McKay, Hughes, Thurman, and Larsen achieved simultaneously. Slavery as the economic foundation of everything the Compsons were and lost is felt as atmosphere and guilt at most, never examined as social and political structure. Without that examination the psychology warps into obscurity rather than illumination. Faulkner probes the legacy of slavery while scarcely naming the weapons of class oppression, exploitation, and racial violence that produced it, or the outrage that it was and is. This is the literature of diversion and murk rather than penetration and insight. It’s limited in ways that serve and protect domineering supremacist interests — very convenient for an author who was notoriously racist in some of his direct public expression.

The Compson family are Mississippi plantation aristocracy and their wealth, land, and social position derive directly from slaveholding. This is the foundation the entire novel rests on. The decaying mansion, the lost pasture sold to send Quentin to Harvard, the family’s psychological wreckage are all downstream from that original material accumulation and slave-holding circumstances and its collapse after the Civil War.

What’s remarkable and damning about The Sound and the Fury is that these facts are structurally present everywhere and directly confronted almost nowhere. Dilsey and her family are the descendants of Compson slaves, still living on the property, still serving the family. That continuity is right there in the novel’s build. The relationship between the Compson pathology and the crime of slaveholding that produced their world is the thing the story most needs to examine and most consistently refuses to examine directly. If once you engage that, you would be forced to engage more fully the explicit existing oppressions of capitalist society. Such novels quickly become literary taboo, especially if any fully human consciousness — that is, politically aware and, say, liberatory socialistic — would be explored with it.

Faulkner aestheticizes the decline of the former slave-holders in land stolen from the Native peoples, as alluded to by the county name, and he makes the Compsons tragic rather than culpable. He keeps the novel’s sympathy almost entirely within the white family while Dilsey endures with a dignity that the novel admires but doesn’t examine. Her endurance becomes a kind of moral backdrop against which the white tragedy plays out. This is not an accidental formal limitation. It is consistent with the man who said publicly that he would rather “shoot down Negroes in the street” than enforce their civil and human rights. The gothic atmosphere of the fiction and the explicit racism and frequent lying of Faulkner’s biography are not separate things. They are the same impulses and commitments expressed in different ways.

The abominations of white slave-owning and cruel capitalism are the novel’s underexplored and obscured drivers, the things that explain everything Faulkner treats as mysterious, the curse that he casts as metaphysical when it is entirely historical and material. That evasion is not accidental. It’s what the elaborate technique does by design.

Faulkner never puts a Black consciousness in the middle of things with the same formal elaboration he gives the Compsons. Dilsey is observed, dignified, enduring — and external. No interior monologue for Dilsey. Might be too revealing. Or should be. The novel’s famous stylistic complexity is reserved for white interiority only. There might as well be Jim Crow signs — Whites Only — for this Jim Crow novel that helped Faulkner win the Nobel Prize. The crime of slavery and racial terror that produced the Compson wealth and the Compson pathology remains functionally present but narratively peripheral. Faulkner circles it endlessly without ever looking straight at it. It’s typical canonized half-literature full of half-people, lobotomized, brainwashed, by an author with the same mindset, consciousness, and social and political commitments, racist principles.

Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth (1929) by contrast puts everything on the surface — the poverty, the violence, the sexual coercion, the class mechanics — because Marie Rogers is not oblique in expression, as she has little or no privilege to protect. She’s barefoot and dirt poor like her parents, a descendent of European colonizers, true, but utterly dispossessed, and a descendent of the Cherokee also. She cannot aestheticize her dispossession because she grapples with it constantly, powerfully, and directly. The novel is rawer and far more real than Faulkner’s work, and incomparably more insightful about how power operates in and against mind, body, and society. The consciousness and perception of Smedley’s novel surpasses that of Faulkner’s work in every way, shape, and form — breadth and depth.

The comparison reveals that the formal complexity in Faulkner serves concealment more than revelation. Smedley’s relative formal plainness is far from a limitation of any kind, artistic or normative. Her plainness is cutting and clairvoyant, and an honest relationship between form and content that Faulkner’s fancies void. Similarly with the other great novels of the dispossessed in and around the Big Bang. In both aesthetic and normative achievement — that is, in artistic achievement — let alone as social and political force, they far overshadow any and all of Faulkner’s work and that of the other canonized novelists.

The real literary heart and talent, the lived experience and vibrancy of the twenties and thirties, as with the teens and early years of the century, have been all but completely driven from public consciousness. On purpose. By the usual suspects of the establishment. Promoted and canonized instead are retrograde authors like William Faulkner. Does anyone ever stop to think how many millions of people the South killed during, before, and after the American Civil War (sometimes in cooperation with the North), because they wanted to keep enslaving Black people? While the abolitionists fought resolutely against the brutal and perverse institution? Could it be more ghastly? And the so-called great writer of the American South chose to write about — not that. Plus, outside his novels in his life, as widely reported, Faulkner denigrated Black people, and advocated for slowing integration, as if the people being lynched and bombed and disenfranchised should wait a little longer for the white Southern conscience to catch up.

Faulkner in his novels does not remotely fully express what slavery and its aftermath did to the masses of people, nor what bigoted capitalism continues to do. He does not dramatize the terror of Reconstruction, or lynching as a system, or the ongoing structural violence of the racial structures from the perspective of anyone experiencing that violence directly. He and canonized American literature copy and spawn a psychological, cultural, and sociological bigotry and ignorance the leads to a lethal neofascist like the supremacist President Trump. He and the canon reproduce and cover for white stupidity and bigotry, supremacy and capitalist lethality. The Black characters in his fiction exist at the periphery of white consciousness, and not as the central experiencing subjects of their own historical reality. The formal complexity and the moral failure are not separate things. They are an elaboration of an aesthetic object that functions to evade and displace Southern (and some Northern) guilt and responsibility, political and moral obligation. And so the literary establishment canonized it, because it too is racist. And imperialist. Bigoted capitalist. Plutocratic and pro-war. This is what establishment liberalism and conservativism has always been — genocidal from the founding of the country — leading directly to the more overt neofascist form of bigoted capitalist empire led by President Trump.

Faulkner’s melodramas are of psychological and social dysfunction of the white Southern ruling class in the aftermath of losing a war fought to preserve slavery. Any haunting nature of his work is of white Southern guilt and loss, not the haunting of the people who mainly paid the often horrific price, and are still paying, whose haunting Richard Wright explores in Native Son and whose haunting Toni Morrison would later depict in Beloved with the authority and the interiority that Faulkner never achieved because he never tried to inhabit that consciousness from within.

Faulkner is the most brainwashed and lobotomized of writers, and emblematic of bigoted white culture. The canonical elevation of William Faulkner’s entitled white gloom over Agnes Smedley’s bottom-up revolutionary dramatization and discourse is not based on a neutral aesthetic preference but on a political choice about whose response to American racial, economic, and imperial violence is recognized as literary and whose is dismissed as propaganda.

Faulkner aestheticizing Southern guilt is literature. Smedley’s personal witness and institutional critique is sociology, at best. And the great Black novelists have been similarly dismissed, as we’ve seen, in a scandalous inversion of reality and both literary and humanistic hierarchy. Faulkner’s go slow on integration interviews and blatant derogatory and racist asides make visible what the formal complexity of his fiction largely achieves. It finds a way to feel the weight of the historical crime without being required to depict it or act on it in the present, to even clearly acknowledge it for the world to know, see, and feel. It’s an enormous gutting of full human consciousness and of social and political reality, of society altogether.

The American South as the capital of the white supremacy that continues to grip the entire country killed more Americans than any international “enemy” in the nation’s history in order to preserve the right to own and enslave human beings. The canonical tradition’s response was to elevate the white Southern writer who portrayed that crime as tragic atmosphere and family guilt, while blocking and dismissing extremely accomplished and liberatory Black writers the whole while.

Faulkner is the perfect literary figure of the canonical tradition of white empire. His novels are elaborate enough to engage formalist critics, Southern enough to perform regional atmosphere, guilty enough about slavery to seem morally serious, while never condemning or exposing much of anything imperative. That Faulkner could ever be considered a major writer is a travesty that could only happen in a supremacist country and world. Faulkner served a distinctive ideological function. His writing became the supposed proof that the American South had tragic depth and literary seriousness, which served post Civil War reconciliation narratives — as opposed to reparation narratives — and deflected from the ongoing reality of Jim Crow and brutal and bigoted capitalism. The manufacture of Faulkner’s reputation was both aesthetic and political, and the specific bigoted and imperialist ideological use gives his reputation an especially odious kind of bad faith.

William Faulkner was more a racist bitter clinger to white supremacy — willing to defend a bigoted and perverse way of life — than anything else, and his novels’ treatment of the dispossessed reflects it. The suffering in his fiction is dramatized in bad faith elegy rather than indictment. Victor Hugo in Les Misérables does something categorically different and categorically greater. He writes about society and people in distress with an enlightened urgency and moral seriousness that produces far greater literary, social, and psychological effect. And Agnes Smedley in Daughter of Earth is right there with him. Hugo tries to reform all of Paris and France simultaneously, critiquing the worst of human institutions while inspiring the best of human capacity, dramatizing how cruel social and psychological structures hammer the people while also insisting on their dignity and possibility. He wrote Les Misérables as a social condemnation of the prison system, of impoverishment, of the way society manufactures criminals like Jean Valjean and tragic victims like the sex worker Fantine — brutalized by the system that then punishes her for the consequences of that brutalization — while celebrating the human moral capacity that survives even the most crushing conditions. Valjean’s arc makes this argument dramatically and Hugo spells it out in explicit discourse as well, refusing the canonical tradition’s separation of aesthetic achievement from normative statement. The novel indicts and inspires simultaneously. Faulkner elegizes and obscures.

Like Agnes Smedley, Victor Hugo made no separation between the political document and the epic novel, between the social indictment and the full human consciousness. They are the same thing in Les Misérables as they are in Daughter of Earth. They both wrote a political epic, and the political seriousness is inseparable from the full human consciousness each achieves. The condemnation is revealed in the full humanity, both dramatically and explicitly. The accusation and the illumination are one thing, not two, and yet they are both dramatic and both explicit. It’s called literature for grown-ups. The literary establishment remains allergic to contemporary exposure still today. The revolutionary barricades of 1832, which occupy a large portion of Les Misérables, showed the great passion and push for political change with contemporaneous obviousness and effect. Hugo valued above all struggling for human dignity against oppression, while showing that the particular worthy historical uprising at the time failed and that its young idealists died largely unsupported by the Paris working class they were fighting for. Enjolras and other revolutionary youth in the novel are heroic and doomed, and Hugo expresses their value without sentimentalizing their defeat. These characters represent and explain and reveal all that might be revealed — in psychology and sociology, in politics and emotions and ideas, and otherwise — as does Hugo’s direct discourse.

Les Misérables is a philosophical argument too, and in some ways even a theological one. It’s a novel of a renaissance in human consciousness. Les Misérables is in and of itself its own literary Big Bang in the novel. Smearing and dismissing the novel from human consciousness as the political and literary establishment both attempted was like trying to dismiss the alphabet from human perception, with that level of integrity. The bishop Myriel in the beginning of the novel establishes a standard of radical Christian action and principle against which Hugo measures every character and every institution that follows — including the heinous Inspector Javert and the judicial and penal systems he serves and attacks with. Javert’s vicious legalism shows great systemic criminality, spiritual death to its perpetrator, and material death to its victims.

Hugo names the social workings specifically. All the while dissecting human morality and mentality, he also shows the specific brutality of the various institutions that exploit, smash, and abandon people — the state, its police and prisons, landlords, monied employers and businesses, the military, convents and the church. Poverty, law, property, the class interests of the wealthy and middle class, the derelict and destructive state, these social, political, and cultural institutions are a huge part of the consciousness of the novel, understood to be structural and are delineated in Les Misérables in a way that slavery and the specific institutions and forces of its bigoted capitalist terrorist Jim Crow aftermath are not made conscious and known in the works of Faulkner. A kind of lobotomized experience is presented instead, to blinding, distorting, and debilitating effect, whatever merits there might be otherwise to such an approach. Les Misérables, even as a single novel, is far superior to Faulkner’s entire oeuvre as accomplishment, effect, and art.3 In fact, it’s far superior to the vast majority of canonized literature and extraordinarily exposing of it. It’s no mere philosophic and aesthetic exercise, though both its strong elements of philosophy and aesthetics are beyond accomplished and profound.

Like Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, and unlike Faulkner and the other canonized American novelists, Victor Hugo was also a groundbreaking, pre-eminent, and often socio-political poet as well as novelist. Not to mention, he was also a prolific visual artist, producing thousands of drawings and sketches, work that is dark, atmospheric, and surprisingly modern in feeling, just as the modernist style of his 1829 novel The Last Day of a Condemned Man was nearly a century ahead of his time, though far more socially engaged in intent and effect — like the great dispossessed modernist moments of the dispossessed writers of the Big Bang. The buried and belittled Nella Larsen pushed modernism to its most important moments in Quicksand and Passing.4 Victor Hugo in his two most socially engaged novels was a Big Bang novelist 67 years ahead of time. He is one of the greatest artists of all time. He possessed a greater consciousness than Shakespeare and was as great an artist.

Faulkner’s art, let alone the consciousness of his art, pales by comparison to the great dispossessed writers of his time, in the literary Big Bang. A century ago, like prominent establishment literary critic and editor Malcolm Cowley, his great proponent, Faulkner and his literary compatriots involved themselves in the imperial war of World War One, while Michael Gold sensibly fled the draft to Mexico. Malcolm Cowley, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos drove ambulances. F. Scott Fitzgerald joined the Army. William Falkner changed his name to Faulkner and managed to join the Canadian Air Force, then lied about his time in the service and “paraded” around in a uniform after the war, and flew private planes through his later life. Cowley helped Faulkner win the Nobel Prize in literature three years after he got the Portable Faulkner published, mid-century. None of this establishment literary cohort were ever politically arrested or even much surveilled, except Dos Passos briefly after the war, and later Hemingway a bit during the time of the Spanish Civil War and World War Two, superficially.

On the flip side, though Cowley knew them all well, the actual greatest novelists of the era, Mike Gold, Claude McKay, Agnes Smedley, Langston Hughes — a diverse group of dispossessed leftists, artists, and intellectuals — received no Portable editions from Cowley and the publishing establishment and all were deeply and actively opposed to American involvement in World War one and the war itself and were heavily surveilled or politically arrested. And they all were contributors to or editors of the literary and cultural magazines that were shut down by the government during World War One and restarted under other names some years thereafter. Included among this group was anti-imperialist anarchist and brilliant literary critic Emma Goldman, though not a novelist, who was deported, after first being imprisoned and charged under the espionage act, as was Agnes Smedley.

Cowley’s imperial warfaring group of four, including himself, became the literary establishment and Cold Warriors, propped up by big money and awards, institutionalized, the ones who taught and gave talks in the colleges, also as part of the Cold War MFA in creative writing institutionalization of literature. Meanwhile the liberatory left group of four, McKay, Gold, Smedley, and Hughes, as socialists, Communist, or progressive populists, each in the 1920s wrote novels greater in every way than the best of the establishment four, including F. Scott Fitzgerald’s passé socialite novel The Great Gatsby, which remains lauded as the great American novel by the establishment, much like the editorially mauled white savior novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Meanwhile, Faulkner and Hemingway were awarded the establishment’s greatest prize in literature, the Nobel, in the midst of the cold war and cultural repression, 1949 and 1954.

At the same time, the four great literary leftists’ novels were buried, rejected from publication, and falsely smeared as inartistic and excessively propagandistic by the Cold War Red Scarce McCarthy Era liberal-conservative imperial establishment for decades thereafter. These effects are felt to the present day, in a society-wide cultural war that has been wholly revived by Trump. Yet establishment liberals have always waged Cold War against the most vital of the present and the future too, per the demands of the militant and bigoted plutocrat capitalist establishment. Extremely telling further is that simultaneous to the actual literary Big Bang, the tame chronicler of the American establishment Sinclair Lewis was awarded the 1930 Nobel Prize in literature. At least he had the good sense to recommend the literary writing of Michael Gold in his speech.

Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald were elevated to the highest literary and cultural peaks for many decades to come, to the present second, the usual entitled suspects all, while the much greater and more valuable novels of McKay, Smedley, Gold, Hughes, Thurman, Larsen, and others — as with their much more fully human persons and other works — would be battered and belied, bruised and buried, and for all practical purposes burnt on the reactionary pyre of the American literary establishment — resplendent in all its cultural, social, and political vainglory and menace. The great novelist Wallace Thurman would have been an even greater writer if he had not died at age 32 in 1934. His three lively and biting novels have as much art and more humanity than Faulkner’s collected works. Nella Larsen likewise, and the other great dispossessed novelists of the era. Compared to Thurman, Faulkner was and remained an amateur. Both the literary and general culture, the full human personality and the world, are better, more greatly lit by Thurman and the other five premier novelists of that coruscant and bountiful moment of the Big Bang, suppressed novelists who are more conscious and incisive, more fully human and artful, and more revolutionary and liberatory than the entitled canonized establishment stars.

The opening of The Sound and the Fury:

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.

“Here, caddie.” He hit. They went away across the pasture. I held to the fence and watched them going away.

“Listen at you, now.” Luster said. “Aint you something, thirty-three years old, going on that way. After I done went all the way to town to buy you that cake. Hush up that moaning. Aint you going to help me find that quarter so I can go to the show tonight.”

They were hitting little, across the pasture. I went back along the fence to where the flag was. It flapped on the bright grass and the trees.

Thomas Wolfe was 29 when Look Homeward, Angel was published in 1929. He was received as a wunderkind, or at least as a bursting new talent arriving fully formed. The novel made an immediate impact and established him overnight as one of the most exciting new voices in American fiction, though many in his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina were furious and scandalized at the novel’s thinly veiled portraits of real local people, making him unwelcome there for several years.

Wolfe was immediately brought into the emerging canonical hierarchy while Hughes, Larsen, Thurman, Gold, Smedley, and McKay were not, though all published within the same thirteen-month window of the Big Bang. Wolfe was an Anglo white male, Southern, writing in a Romantic-egotistical tradition that the literary establishment has long indulged and celebrated. Obliviously expansive, his rhapsodic excesses were read as genius, while the groundbreaking and impressive formal, cultural, and political achievements of the six suppressed novelists and their liberatory novels were dismissed outright, or considered excessive or superfluous, propagandistic or sociological.

Look Homeward, Angel is a maximalist scatter of an ironically limited sort — Whitmanesque, sprawling, autobiographical, and perhaps the most politically adrift work in the Big Bang. The writing was instantly dated, overwrought, but never mind. The protagonist Eugene Gant grows up in the fictional Altamont, North Carolina, the son of a stonecutter father and boarding house mother. He moves through childhood and adolescence and early literary ambition toward his eventual departure to college. Gant is the focus of everything, drawn in endless detail. The prose pours out as flat and tedious as the long descriptive passages of Kerouac’s On the Road — another celebrated white male novelist whose attempted exuberant extravagance the establishment miscast as vision and revelation. Eugene’s suffering is that of a sensitive young man in a provincial town, not the suffering of the dispossessed or the war-torn. His social world exists primarily as the material out of which the self is formed, rather than as a larger organism and controlling system to be understood, engaged, contested.

Eugene is born as if exceptional into an ordinary world, and the novel’s moral and aesthetic focus validates that exceptionalism, or attempts to. His sensitivity, his hunger, his verbal capacity mark him as categorically different from Altamont, different from his family, different from the boardinghouse world, different from the provincial South. His suffering is the suffering of the exceptional individual in an insufficient world.

Compare Eugene Gant to Agnes Smedley’s protagonist in Daughter of Earth. Marie is born into destitution and mining camps, into a desperate struggle to survive in a kind of economic, social, and sexual war that grinds poor rural women and men into subjugation and ill health, alcoholic addiction and illiteracy. She does not use her consciousness as a refuge from that daily grind but as a battlefield within it. She engages a tough life. She doesn’t rhapsodize it. The ideologies and material facts that are killing people physically and mentally and emotionally are shown direct and thoughtfully inside her psychology, and subsequent understanding, as forces that she attempts to figure out, confront, and work her way through. She experiences victories and defeats of her self and her loved ones and her communities.

She seeks to engage not flee, though she will do plenty of that too. She works her way across America and then Europe and then ultimately to China not to transcend her origins but because the same war she was born into is being fought there and her revolutionary consciousness follows it across geography. Marie Rogers carries her fractured world with her as the source of her political knowledge and moral authority and her fighting efforts for change, rather than as mere raw material for an ostensibly great writer and intellectual, like Eugene Gant does. Marie Rogers’ growth — her bildungsroman — is that of a writer, an artist, an intellectual like Eugene Gant, but unlike Gant, also that of a much more fully conscious human and ultimately committed revolutionary. She becomes ever more perceptive and wholly experienced, while Gant remains imprisoned in his own provincial exceptionalism. Marie Rogers is extraordinary and powerful. Eugene Gant is fancy and overwrought.

Where Eugene measures the world by what it offers his exceptional consciousness Marie measures things by what the world is doing to brutalized people like her — the poor, the colonized, the sexually exploited, the racially dominated. Her consciousness is fully human, not fancy and circumscribed self-admiration and self-regard. The novel is not about how fine and private Marie’s perceptions are. It’s about what those perceptions reveal about the world producing the crushing circumstances of the dispossessed.

Marie’s revolutionary consciousness and political knowledge comes from having been of that community, from having shared its vulnerability and its rage, from carrying its experience as the source of her authority to charge and challenge the system. She is not escaping the community. She is speaking for it and from it even when she’s geographically far from it. Eugene Gant leaves Altamont in surpassing it. Marie Rogers leaves Missouri and New Mexico and continues to confront the economic and social and political wars that made Missouri and New Mexico what they are, extending her efforts to California and New York, and India and China where the revolutionary struggle is continuous with the struggle she was born into.

The canonized protagonist transcends his rough origins for escapist fancies — the American Dream, individualist and too often antisocial, like Jay Gatsby. The suppressed protagonist follows her principled and engaged human consciousness to their logical political conclusions across the world. These are both deeply personal and cultural choices, with very different social and political consequences. That’s the entitled versus dispossessed binary — the canonical versus the suppressed — in two humans, two works of literature, two directions of migration and living.

The aspiring writer protagonist is an ideologically loaded choice that connects Wolfe directly to the canonical tradition’s deepest commitments and characteristic trajectories. The writer aspires to the establishment! The novel about the sensitive young man who will become a novelist is the form that most completely holds up individual consciousness as the measure of all value, but only within pre-formed social bounds, often very private, never questioning the order that produces and validates exceptionalism as a category in the first place. Eugene’s inspiration is conventional, the establishment’s approved version of artistic genius, sensitive and hungry and self-regarding, aiming for individual transcendence rather than collective transformation. The protagonist’s superior perception is both the object of focus and the focusing object simultaneously. It’s all about him, the collective not so much.

Apparently coincidentally, Agnes Smedley and Langston Hughes gave their protagonists very similar last names, Rogers and Rodgers, in their Big Bang novels. Smedley named Marie Rogers after Roger Baldwin, the founder and director of the ACLU who was a close friend and supporter of hers, particularly during her imprisonment in 1918 when Baldwin led the campaign for her release, advocating for her as an innocent victim of wartime hysteria. Their friendship endured, and Baldwin remained a key figure in Smedley’s network of radical and progressive allies.

Marie Rogers and Sandy Rodgers, the two most fully human bildungsroman protagonists of the Big Bang, sharing the name of one of the period’s most important civil liberties defenders connects the two novels across the boundary between the Harlem Renaissance and the “radical” white working class tradition, and shows the deep unity and universality of the suppressed tradition despite the establishment’s literary, cultural, and political segregation. Two of the six suppressed Big Bang novels and novelists — cross gender and cross race, same class — have protagonists that carry, intentionally or not, the name of the man whose civil liberties institution would spend the following century defending the human rights that establishment oppression was designed and used to destroy.

It’s illuminating also to compare Wolfe’s protagonist Eugene Gant to Langston Hughes’ protagonist Sandy Rodgers in Not Without Laughter — also a boy growing up, also moving toward some kind of future beyond his community’s immediate circumstances, but never coded as categorically superior to the people around him, never marked by a special sensitivity that elevates him above his community’s collective experience. Sandy’s story is embedded in the community. Eugene’s story uses the community as the material his superior consciousness will eventually transform into art.

That’s the difference between the bildungsroman as community portrait and the bildungsroman as artist’s self-justification. The canonical tradition overwhelmingly rewards the latter, the individual exceptional consciousness ascending toward art and away from rough origins, while suppressing the former, the communal bildungsroman of collective dignity and shared struggle. The individual American Dream of self-transcendence is celebrated. The communal American Dream of equality, liberty, and justice — the dream of Agnes Smedley and Marie Rogers, of Sandy Rodgers and his community, of the fully human and the communally rooted — is what the establishment canon is built to tame, diminish, and where possible destroy. The Martin Luther King Dream. King was himself destroyed, diminished, controlled by the establishment cultural and political and economic canon that was unable to exclude him entirely, much as it tried.

Look Homeward, Angel is an obsessive novel of self-making, an autobiographical novel far less expansive of person and world than the communal autobiographical novels of Agnes Smedley, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Michael Gold, all published within months of Look Homeward, Angel. At its best moments, when the prose finds some rhythm and contextual grip, Wolfe achieves something of what he attempts — the expression of a life, place, and time that is impactful and resonant. But it is thin and near-sighted and hollow compared to the great liberatory and populist novels of the Big Bang. Look Homeward, Angel is a typical establishment product, making no demands on its social world. It doesn’t much illuminate and investigate and expose the structures of power and exploitation that shape the world Eugene Gant moves through, or challenge the reader to think differently about class, race, labor, or injustice, or position itself against any dominant interest. It simply moves through the world as given, as backdrop, as atmosphere. What’s disturbing is what the canon praises and rewards and what it belittles and punishes. It’s not civilized at all. It’s barbaric, though it thinks it’s not.

The social and political passivity makes it safe, canonical, laudable by the state-capitalist establishment, which rewards literature that is formally ambitious enough to seem serious while being politically blind, inert, or distorted enough to pose no threat. The establishment exalts the disengaged, calls it literary, and smears the actively engaged, calls it propaganda — in a complete inversion of greatness in literature. Wolfe gives the literary establishment the appearance of greatness, the verbal display, the lyrical reach, the seemingly big gestures, without any continuous basic insight or discomfort or inspiration that social engagement and a vital social consciousness produces.

The canonical gatekeepers select work that can be celebrated without social or political consequence, which often means work without much social or political meaning, sense, or insight at all. People are expected not to notice how clipped and de-conscious this is, so self-storied as to be half-lobotomized: My story! My personal relationship with God, My God: Me! It scarcely takes America’s leading twentieth century philosopher John Dewey to observe in The Public and Its Problems (1927) that “Even if ‘consciousness’ were the wholly private matter that the individualistic tradition in philosophy supposes it to be, it would still be true that consciousness is of objects, not of itself.” Just so, the greatest novelists understand that to fully represent personal consciousness they must dramatically incorporate not only people but places, things, and events in a way that speaks to the most pressing and truly formative conditions of what it means to be fully human.

In Wolfe’s novel there is no examination of privilege, no confrontation with systemic suffering, no challenge to the social order that produces both the entitled novel and its entitled audience. Contrast this with Gold, McKay, Smedley, Hughes, Larsen, Thurman, and the related, Tsiang and McNickle and others, all of whom dramatize or directly confront pointed, powerful, and uncomfortable truths about the world they inhabit and that the reader more or less inhabits with them. Those demands, the demands of a social conscience and social consciousness integrated into private conscience or private consciousness, are a large part of what gets these writers blocked in the first place, or suppressed afterward if they have enough of a platform or other leverage or connections to get published at all. The establishment prefers the consequence-free kind of literature and punishes the socially demanding, fully psychological, and inspiring kind. Or it places, controls, and frames socially challenging art within often very tight, very careful, artificial limits, permitting just enough, of a truncated sort, to appear intellectually open while shutting out further and more threatening revelations and consciousness, fuller story and world.

And so what you get is an endless line of flimsy cardboard consciousnesses of novels set in cardboard worlds, private playhouses, often attempting to give an appearance otherwise. Being fully human and fully socially knowing and engaged, fully conscious, means something that the canonical establishment would prefer literature not to be — and so literary America has actively eviscerated much of the best of itself for decades and centuries, to the present day.

The double opening of Look Homeward, Angel:

PART ONE

. . . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.

Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother’s face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father’s heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

1

A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world.

Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.

The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cut-purse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.

The scientific Big Bang marks the edge of what physics can know. Before the first Planck second, the laws of nature as currently understood break down and explanation stops. It’s a horizon of ignorance, the point where human knowledge hits its limit and can go no further. The literary Big Bang is the opposite — not a limit but a culmination, the moment when accumulated historical forces, political consciousness, organic dispossessed experience, and formal literary achievement converge into the greatest concentrated expression of human knowledge and experience in American fiction. This is not where knowledge stops but where it peaks. Both Big Bangs happened in a compressed moment. That’s what the metaphor shares. But where the scientific Big Bang marks the beginning of everything from a point before which nothing can be known, the literary Big Bang marks the culmination of everything that had been building — the socialist surge, the Harlem Renaissance, the internationalism, the dispossessed consciousness — flowering into its fullest expression before being suppressed. The scientific Big Bang is unknowable at its origin but its consequences are permanent and still expanding. The literary Big Bang was suppressed at its origin but its consequences are also permanent and still expanding. Both keep expanding outward from the moment that produced them. One was repressed. Both must expand.

Due to the repression, Americans don’t know their own American novel. Historically, the best American novels have been suppressed from the canon. Some scholars and critics have explored parts of this argument, without going the further step of pointing to a canon of dispossessed works that are greater than the canonized establishment works. Some of these scholars and some of their works include Cary Nelson in Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory 1910-1945 (1989), Barbara Foley in Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction 1929-1941 (1993), Alan Wald in Exiles from a Future Time (2002) and Trinity of Passion (2007), Michael Denning in The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (1997), Paul Lauter in Canons and Contexts (1991), Nina Baym in Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-70 (1978), Jane Tompkins in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860 (1985), Addison Gayle in The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America (1975), Houston Baker in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (1984), Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), among others.

None of these scholars makes the specific argument that the Big Bang window of 1929-1930 represents the greatest concentrated literary achievement in American fiction and that this achievement was systematically suppressed in favor of an ideologically constructed imperial and false canon of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Steinbeck, and so on. Foley and Nelson may come closest structurally but neither makes the sweeping evaluative comparative claim. Foley documents the proletarian tradition without arguing it surpasses the canonical tradition. Nelson argues for recovery without making the strong evaluative claim that what was suppressed was greater than what was canonized. Or to the extent that he does, his focus is on poetry not fiction and the novel. If there is a more interesting and inspiring, valuable and useful book on poetry than Nelson’s Repression and Recovery, I don’t know it. In many ways, it’s the overlapping poetry companion to this project on the novel, exploring some of the same authors and many of the same journals, movements, and cultural formation with even a few extraordinarily beautiful color photos of the cover artwork of the time.

The suppression argument has been made in various forms. The evaluative argument that the suppressed tradition produced the greater literature in the American novel in the twentieth century and ongoing has not been made with the explanation that these great dispossessed and suppressed writers are formally and normatively superior to the canonical writers. Most canon critique scholarship argues for suppression and recovery without making this strong evaluative claim. If the canon is wrong, show me what’s right. Name the greatest suppressed novel and defend that claim. Most of these scholars don’t do that.

Cary Nelson writes about poetry not novels and tends to recovery and documentation rather than strong evaluative ranking. He argues that suppressed poets deserve to be read without consistently arguing that they are greater than the canonical poets. Barbara Foley documents the proletarian novel tradition seriously and argues it deserves canonical status but stops short of arguing that Gold or Smedley or any specific proletarian novelist surpasses Hemingway or Faulkner as a matter of literary achievement. Her argument is essentially that these novels are better than they’ve been credited as being, not that they are the greatest American novels. Alan Wald similarly tends toward recovery and documentation rather than strong evaluative ranking. He argues for the seriousness and significance of the radical literary tradition without consistently arguing that it produced greater literature than the canonical tradition. Michael Denning in The Cultural Front holds up the broader cultural achievement of the Popular Front era rather than specific novels, and tends toward cultural sociology rather than literary evaluation. He argues for the significance of the tradition without making strong claims about specific novels being the greatest suppressed achievements. Paul Lauter makes an institutional argument about canon construction without consistently arguing that specific suppressed works are greater than canonical ones. His work on the Heath Anthology is about inclusion and representation rather than evaluative hierarchy. Jane Tompkins comes closest among these scholars to inverting the hierarchy, arguing in Sensational Designs that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a greater achievement than Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter because it does more significant cultural work, a strong evaluative claim, but Tompkins’s criterion of cultural work rather than formal and normative achievement is a partly different framework.

The implicit assumption of most canon critique scholarship is that inclusion and representation are the goals, which means the scholarship often skirts claims that suppression cost American literature its greatest achievements. I argue that Daughter of Earth is as great an American novel as there is, and that the Big Bang tradition of the suppressed dispossessed novels is formally and normatively superior to the canonical tradition, including artistically superior, and the suppression of this tradition was not only unjust but a catastrophic loss for American literary culture and consciousness, and culture and society in general.

There is the problem of academic institutional constraint. Academic literary criticism operates within institutional frameworks that reward certain kinds of arguments and punish others. The strong evaluative claim — this novel is greater than that novel, the suppressed tradition surpasses the canonical one — is the kind of argument that academic culture has been trained to distrust as subjective, impressionistic, and insufficiently rigorous. The New Critical legacy, despite being politically conservative, paradoxically shaped even radical academic criticism by making aesthetic judgment seem less intellectually serious than historical documentation or theoretical analysis. You can get tenure for documenting suppression. You cannot easily get tenure for arguing that Agnes Smedley is a greater novelist than Ernest Hemingway because the claim seems to exceed what respectable scholarship can engage.

There’s a split in thought between inclusion and evaluation. Canon critique scholarship almost universally frames its project as inclusion and recovery rather than evaluation and replacement. The implicit goal is a bigger and more diverse canon rather than a better and more honest one. This framing is politically safer. It doesn’t require arguing that what’s already in the canon is wrong or lesser, only that it’s incomplete. While that may be at times correct, it’s also often an evasion and essential falsification when great suppressed works are argued to deserve a seat at the table rather than argued as more accomplished and more valuable than what’s already sitting there. The inclusion frame is essentially a liberal pluralist argument glossed in a bit of radical language. It leaves the canonical hierarchy intact while adding marginalized figures to its edges even though much of the canonical tradition can be exposed as inferior and fraudulent.

Commenting in a recent interview with on canon debates, English literary scholar who is currently working in America recently noted:

I do think that the canon is good. I do think it’s very hard to knock someone out of the canon. And when those attempts have been made, they’ve often failed.

So there was famously a generation that didn’t like Milton—the T.S. Eliot generation. Several very prominent critics all made their case against Milton and thought he was overrated and all this stuff. And, well, look how that went.

John Milton and his epic poem Paradise Lost were not ultimately devalued or knocked out of the canon. But Hemingway, Faulkner, and Wolfe are not John Milton, and they did not write Paradise Lost, whether or not they aspired too. Milton was an accomplished and serious intellectual and in ways progressive for his time — more like Agnes Smedley and the other Big Bang authors in being more intellectual and liberatory than like Hemingway, Faulkner, and Wolfe. Wolfe has already been mainly nudged from the canon, and none of these novelists, and we can include Fitzgerald and Steinbeck in this, were serious intellectuals and scarcely even pretended to be so. If anything in their literary works, they played up their private fixations rather than any great public consciousness, which makes them ripe for the picking — or the booting from the canon — in favor of Smedley, Gold, McKay, Hughes, and Thurman, among others. I’m not predicting their expulsion from the canon, because they received so much support and were given so many advantages as compared to the dispossessed authors that allowed them to comparatively augment their production. One might argue that some of the canonized should remain solidly in the canon’s second tier of writers rather than in its first tier, which should go to the great dispossessed authors. Institutional and cultural inertia and propaganda being what it is, they will be difficult to dislodge or replace. Not impossible, though. And they are already long gone, as far as I’m concerned.

There’s a tension between social justice concerns and literary judgment. Institutional scholarship is not always especially helpful in this, even at its most progressive. Much canon critique scholarship is driven primarily by social justice commitments — recovering women writers, writers of color, working class writers — rather than by literary judgment. This produces a situation where the argument for recovery is grounded in identity and representation rather than in the claim that the suppressed works are formally and normatively greater than the canonical ones, artistically greater. The social justice framing is important and real but it allows the canonical tradition to respond by saying these writers are being included as a matter of diversity or fairness rather than because they are the greatest writers, which leaves the evaluative hierarchy intact. My essay argues not just that Gold and Smedley and McKay and others were treated unjustly but that they produced the greater literature, a fundamentally different and more challenging claim.

There’s a fear of being called ideological. Canon critique scholars are aware that their work will be accused of subordinating literary judgment to political ideology — of arguing for writers because of their politics rather than their literary achievement. This awareness can create defensiveness and ironically prevent the scholars from making evaluative claims that would often hold. They document suppression and argue for recovery but stop short of saying the suppressed writers are greater because they fear that claim will be dismissed as politically motivated rather than literarily grounded. My argument goes all the way through this and refuses any such defensiveness. I focus on suppressed novels and novelists that are greater than the canonized novels and novelists. The canonical tradition’s formal achievements are often inferior because they aestheticize and obscure or distort where the suppressed tradition reveals, clarifies, and artistically compels. This is both a confidence and a clarity of literary judgment that the academic canon critique is conditioned and trained to avoid.

Making a strong evaluative claim may appear to require extensive comparative close readings as proof. This perceived demand is surely part of what discourages critics from making the claim at all. Reading Gold alongside Hemingway sentence by sentence and showing which is formally and normatively superior, reading Larsen alongside Woolf and arguing for Larsen’s greater achievement is real critical work and it requires both the willingness to make strong evaluative judgments and the critical criteria to defend them comparatively. Most canon critique scholarship has different priorities. And so it recovers and contextualizes suppressed works without doing the comparative work that might make the evaluative claim stick and resonate, and more often not even making the evaluative claim in the first place. A full sense of literary capacity as understood from inside the practice of art helps with that — something a literary artist might have that a scholar might not. A hybrid literary artist and scholar is a dangerous thing. A hybrid liberatory literary artist and scholar is a dangerous thing to an oppressive imperial culture. Along with institutional critique and capsule characterizations, I do some comparative contextual evaluation of norms and styles in the “Hemingway Misdirection,” “Fitzgerald Canonized McKay Buried,” the “Faulkner Flaw,” and in various points and asides throughout this project. I’m reluctant to do much line-by-line comparison because so much of it seems so obvious at a glance in the excerpts I provided, or upon any considered comparative reading that anyone can do for themselves. It seems so obvious — once you know where to look and why, and how to compare and comprehend, which is what I mostly focus on. It seems to me easy enough to compare the canonical and suppressed traditions directly and argue for the suppressed tradition’s superiority on specific formal and normative grounds once the evaluative standard is made clear, as I explain throughout.

Then there’s the Gramscian blind spot. Most canon critique scholarship, even when it uses Gramscian frameworks, tends to apply the organic versus traditional intellectual distinction to the production of the works without applying it to the production of the criticism. The scholars themselves are traditional intellectuals operating within institutional frameworks that shape what arguments they can make and how they can make them. They document the suppression of organic intellectual cultural production from within the institutional restrictions that performed the suppression in the first place. This is what Mark McGurl does in The Program Era. This is what Frederic Jameson does in The Political Unconscious and elsewhere. The result is that the criticism reproduces the evasions it supposedly critiques. It barely acknowledges the suppressed organic dispossessed tradition and the most threatening counter-hegemonic tendencies and more often ignores them entirely, because full engagement is either unthinkable or would require evaluation that could threaten the critics’ institutional positions, ideologies, and beliefs. My own work is written from outside those institutions — on Substack, self-published, without academic affiliation — so there’s no necessary block, mental or otherwise, to making strong evaluative claims. I have no intellectual or social status to protect, no institutional position to maintain, which is exactly the organic intellectual position from which the strongest criticism can be made. Plus, I have my own “radical” fiction to explain and support, along with that of my liberatory socialist allies. All of which also exists as some of the contemporary proof of the suppression — as I see it.

And there may be a deeper problem. All of these specific failures may point to a single deeper failure that is the inability or unwillingness to trust literary judgment as a form of knowledge. Academic criticism has spent decades arguing that aesthetic judgment is always ideologically constructed, always a disguised power move, always a product of the critic’s subject position rather than of the work’s actual achievement. This argument has real force as a critique of canonical gatekeeping. But it also saws off the branch it sits on — by making all aesthetic judgment ideologically suspect, it eliminates the possibility of making positive evaluative claims that canon critique requires. If all aesthetic judgment is ideologically constructed then the claim that the suppressed tradition produced greater literature is just another ideology rather than a true critical judgment. I argue that organic dispossessed consciousness and anti-hegemonic consciousness can create the greater literature because their formal and normative achievements come from the fullest possible engagement with the material conditions of human life. That’s not the abandonment of literary judgment. It’s literary judgment grounded in a serious critical framework. It’s what separates this essay from academic canon critique, which often recovers without conclusive evaluation, which adds content without fixing false hierarchy, which implies evaluations without explicitly making them. The suppressed works deserve more than recovery. They deserve the verdict the evidence demands. They deserve full evidence-based analysis and evaluation, comparative and otherwise, because getting it right matters. The suppressions and the corrections have serious effects on art, culture, and life.

Both efforts should be made — 1) expand for inclusion and 2) revolutionize the canon based on literary merit, which includes aesthetic and normative merit — because different quality works deserve different treatment appropriate to their different achievement. A combination of aesthetic merit and normative merit creates artistic merit, which underlies cultural relevance and power. Establishment literature perpetuates the suppression of great art, great literature, by not confronting the suppressive and falsifying ideologies, or by actively continuing to participate in them to one degree or another. The failure to distinguish between these two different projects and act on them is an intellectual failure and missed opportunity that continues much of the suppression it claims to address.

The two projects are distinct and both necessary. The inclusion project — recovering, documenting, and making accessible the full range of suppressed literary production — is valuable and different from the evaluative project. Not every suppressed writer is Agnes Smedley. Not every excluded work is Home to Harlem or Banjo. Some suppressed works deserve recovery and modest canonical inclusion on grounds of historical significance, representational importance, or partial literary achievement without deserving the claim that they are the greatest works in the tradition. Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig deserves recovery and inclusion as the first novel published by a Black woman in America. That is a different and more modest claim than arguing it surpasses Moby-Dick or Daughter of Earth. Both claims can be true simultaneously and conflating them muddles both arguments.

Evaluation — arguing that specific suppressed works are formally and normatively superior, artistically and culturally superior, to specific canonical works — is the more demanding project because it directly challenges the canonical hierarchy rather than expanding its edges and often unwittingly perpetuating it. It requires making judgments that academic culture has trained itself to distrust and that institutional positions make professionally risky, which is why most academic canon critique scarcely attempts it. But without thorough evaluation, inclusion is falsified in its import by the existing hierarchy. The suppressed works are added to syllabi as supplementary reading, as context, as representing underserved communities, while the canonical works falsely retain their status as the measure of literary achievement against which everything else is judged.

Establishment literature perpetuates the suppression. Canonical works passively fail to confront suppressive ideologies, and they actively participate in the reproduction of those ideologies through their formal choices, their social positioning, their institutional function. The Great Gatsby ignores the working class and aestheticizes the entitled class’s self-awareness in ways that make that aestheticization feel like the deepest possible engagement with American experience. Hemingway’s minimalism excludes the organic dispossessed consciousness and creates a framework that makes that exclusion feel like compression and precision rather than impoverishment and ideological choice. Faulkner’s formal complexity avoids overt social critique of slavery and much else, distorts any full sense of psychology, and makes its elaborate evasions feel like the most serious possible engagement with Southern history, society, and psychology. It’s fanciful, and it’s fiction gutted. The complexity and the institutional lauding do the same lobotomizing and brainwashing ideological work simultaneously.

There are no systematically innocent failures to include dispossessed literature in the canon. There are historical and ongoing active oppressive ideological forces of suppression. Ideology is passed off as style — the elaborate, the symbolic, the mannered. Each fosters avoidance while pretending to depth. Institutional forces canonize or bury works according to ideological rather than artistic criteria — the New Critics, Theory, the MFA system, the prize culture, the Armed Services Editions, the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom, the various Cold War assaults — the trials, imprisonment, loyalty oaths, blacklists, publishing censorship — the anti-socialist pro-capitalist imperial mentality, and even delimited recovery scholarship. They do not naturally reflect artistic accomplishment or lack thereof. They actively manufacture and maintain an ideological consensus about what American literature is and what it is for, and what it must not be.

The suppression functions at two levels simultaneously and most canon critique only addresses the first. At the first level — the historical level — specific writers and works were actively suppressed through specific institutional mechanisms: FBI surveillance, HUAC testimony, blacklisting, passport seizure, publishing exclusion, canonical gatekeeping. This is the level at which Foley and Wald and Nelson make a lot of revelations. At the second level — the ongoing level — the canonical works themselves continue to perform the suppression every time they are taught, assigned, praised, and rewarded, because their formal and ideological frameworks define what serious American literature looks like in ways that make the suppressed tradition invisible or marginal or insufficiently literary. A student who reads The Great Gatsby as their introduction to American literary seriousness has already been formed by a framework that makes Gold and Smedley and McKay seem politically tendentious or aesthetically crude before they ever encounter them. The canonical works show what was chosen and elevated over the suppressed tradition, and they actively reproduce the ideological conditions that make the suppression seem like natural aesthetic judgment rather than political choice.

Both projects together — inclusion of the full range of suppressed literary production plus the evaluative argument that the greatest suppressed works surpass the canonical ones — produce an entirely different perception of American literary history rather than merely a more inclusive version of the existing understanding. The inclusion project without the evaluative project produces a bigger canon with the same hierarchy. The evaluative project without the inclusion project creates a counter-canon, a real canon but a limited one. Together they produce what I’m showing here — a full account of what American literary history looks like when the suppression is named, the suppressive mechanisms are documented, the suppressed works are recovered and evaluated honestly, and the canonical works are judged against not only the standard the suppressed tradition establishes rather than the standard of the canonized but against a far more objective, comprehensive, and meaningful standard in general.

The novels should be judged against the fullest possible human consciousness and societal perceptivity, and the inseparable unity of aesthetic and normative achievement that constitutes the greatest literature. The human and the societal may be thought of as the political, and we are political creatures to our core, as is our literature, though New Critical and Theory lobotomization would either deny it or complicate the basic reality out of existence, brainwashing the thinkable and perceivable into the unthinkable and unseeable, unfeelable. At their best, the organic dispossessed position and the anti-hegemonic tradition produce the greater literature. Against that standard the canonical works are revealed as the lesser achievement that the suppression was both consciously and instinctively designed and empowered to conceal. The great dispossessed novels are objectively aesthetically superior in being less mannered, more accessible, more engaging, more profound and sweeping, more stylish5 — paradoxically, given how little deliberate stylistic effort they seem to expend, and how much the canonical writers expend — more graceful, more powerful aesthetically, as well as normatively superior. In other words, by any artistic standard superior — whether intellectual or aesthetic, normative or political.

Even aside from the social and political and psychological limitations of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald and the rest of the canonical tradition — and they are many — their novels are not formally and aesthetically superior to the great novels of the dispossessed that come out of the conjoining influence of the Harlem Renaissance and the socialist uprising. The great dispossessed novels are far more than merely valuable as historical and political documents, they are also the greatest art and literature of the age, and for that matter in American history. Surprised? Does this seem too incredible to be true? What would one expect in imperial culture but coverup where it matters most? Take a look at the news. You see it every second of every day.

The canonical tradition’s formal achievements are inseparable from their mannerism. Hemingway’s minimalism is a style, a pose, a carefully constructed aesthetic identity that calls attention to itself as style because it is not the organic formal expression of a consciousness fully engaged with its material. The iceberg theory is a mannered theory, a deliberate and self-conscious formal program rather than the natural formal consequence of a consciousness intent on expressing all it sees. Faulkner’s stream of consciousness is mannered in the same way. The formal complexity is disproportionate to the material it engages, which is the sign of a consciousness using form to conceal and aestheticize rather than to reveal. To falsify, hide, or distort, unwittingly or intentionally or both. Fitzgerald’s lyrical, symbolic, and other rhetorical distancing may be the most mannered of all — the green light, the valley of ashes, the unreliable narrator. These are formal devices used with great self-consciousness because the material without those devices would expose its own thinness. Or rather, the use of these devices helps keep the material thin and inoffensive to the establishment that tolerates and celebrates its existence.

Smedley’s prose is not mannered. It is direct because it needs to be, and intends to be, in a dramatic exposé. McKay’s prose is not mannered. It is kinetic because the consciousness producing it is kinetic and alive. Larsen’s interiority is not mannered. It is constrained because the consciousness it expresses is constrained by forces the prose cannot escape any more than Helga Crane can escape the crushing gravities of racism, sexism, and class. The formal qualities of the Big Bang tradition emerge organically from the material conditions of the consciousnesses producing them. Content drives form, not vice versa. This is what makes them less mannered and more formally honest than the canonical tradition’s carefully constructed aesthetic programs. This is what makes these novels more human and engaging and meaningful and artistically accomplished than the contorted and gutted novels of the establishment canon.

Academic canon critique undervalues accessibility because it has been coded as a negative quality within the aesthetic ideology of formal complexity that the canonical tradition established. Great art does not need to be formally fancy or complex to be profound and revelatory. The New Critics’ valorization of difficulty, ambiguity, irony, and complexity as the marks of serious literary achievement produced a framework in which accessibility is suspect. Direct, bold, popular appeal is evidence of aesthetic compromise rather than aesthetic achievement. This framework conveniently excludes the Big Bang tradition’s greatest works from serious consideration because they are accessible, because they reach readers directly, because their formal achievements serve communication rather than mystification.

Accessibility is not the enemy of profundity. In fact, it’s the condition of profundity’s fullest realization. A consciousness that sees fully and expresses directly what it sees is more formally accomplished than a consciousness that uses formal complexity to excessively or falsely shade and warp, delimit and inflate, or otherwise aestheticize what it sees. Daughter of Earth appeals to the reader with great immediacy and power because its formal directness is inseparable from its normative urgency. Home to Harlem is accessible because McKay’s dynamic prose is the organic formal expression of a consciousness fully alive to its material. Jews Without Money is accessible because Gold’s directness is the formal consequence of writing from inside the brutal impoverishment rather than observing it from a position of aesthetic safety and bullshit stylization.

The canonical tradition’s mannerisms and elaborations are not signs of depth. The opposite — signs of shallowness, distortion, or cover-up. The formal complexity that can make Faulkner difficult to read is not the complexity of a consciousness fully engaged with its material. It’s the complexity of a consciousness using formal difficulty to avoid the direct truths that full engagement would require, needed hard truths. In the canonical works difficulty as evasion masquerades as profundity. It’s cosmetic, hollow, fraudulent — a misdirection. In the suppressed works, accessibility as directness is mistaken for shallowness. This is an inversion of reality that vaults lesser works above greater works. The literary Big Bang tradition’s accessibility is a formal sign of its greater achievement, not its lesser one.

The Big Bang novels are more engaging because they are more fully alive — more completely human, more socially complete, more formally energetic, more normatively urgent. A novel that centers the dispossessed consciousness from inside and shows the full complexity of that consciousness’s engagement with the world that would destroy it is more interesting and compelling to read than a novel that aestheticizes the entitled class’s self-regard or manages the stoic white male consciousness’s responses to a world it observes from relative privilege. There is more at stake and plainly so. There’s more real life not lost to mannered style. There is more in Home to Harlem to engage the reader’s full attention — more human variety, more social complexity, more formal vitality, more normative urgency — than in The Great Gatsby because McKay’s consciousness has more at stake and sees more fully than Fitzgerald’s.

The canonical tradition’s claim to engagement rests on the formal devices it uses — the symbolic crutches of Gatsby, the obscurant stream of consciousness of Faulkner, the barren minimalist slashing of Hemingway. These literary devices narrow consciousness and perception of society rather than expand it. They make the narrow ideological and hegemonic field of the entitled or stoic or warped or elaborate consciousness feel ostensibly deep and resonant by formal artifice. The Big Bang tradition, the liberatory tendency in American literature, requires no such artifice because the material itself is fully engaging. The consciousness is fully at stake and broadly or deeply revealed. The psychological and social world is fully explored, again to great breadth or depth or both. And the normative urgency is fully expressed. Far more so than in the canonized establishment.

The canonical tradition claims profundity through the aestheticization of private existential experience. Gatsby’s green light is the symbol of the American Dream’s corruption or impossibility. Hemingway’s code of stoic endurance suggests a world without redemptive meaning. Faulkner’s stream of consciousness is the formal expression of Southern guilt and historical burden. These are genuine but partial insights that are achieved at the cost of full engagement with the psychology, emotion, and social world that produces the private existential experience being aestheticized. The profundity is real but partial. In other words, it’s not all that profound. Or broad. The formal play illuminates limited dimensions of human experience while excluding the dimensions that the organic dispossessed consciousness reveals more fully, because it is not playing around, has nothing to cover up, and needs no formal crutches to give more life and meaning and revelations in their works. Don’t need ‘em, could use ‘em, but why? Their works are already fully alive, and there is nothing to cover-up. They are artistic exposés, not aesthetic ornaments.

The Big Bang tradition’s profundity and breadth are fuller because it engages both the private and the public simultaneously and inseparably. Daughter of Earth is as psychologically profound as any canonical novel. Marie Rogers’s inner life is dramatized with a depth and complexity that matches and surpasses anything in Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or Woolf, and it is also socially and politically profound in ways the canonical tradition never achieves because Smedley cannot or will not aestheticize the material conditions of Marie’s inner life any more than Marie can escape them or pretend them away. Passing is as formally subtle as Hemingway’s iceberg tips and as psychologically complex as Mrs. Dalloway, and it’s more socially and politically profound because Larsen does not allow the aesthetic distance that makes Hemingway minimalist or Woolf’s profundity feel merely private and existential rather than also public and structural.

The canonical tradition has created particular conceptions of style as the mark of serious literary achievement, typically something put on — Hemingway’s stripped precision, Fitzgerald’s lyrical elegance, Faulkner’s baroque complexity — and measured everything else against it. But style in the fullest sense is not the decoration of content. It’s not the mannered, and it’s not the elaborate. It’s the formal expression of consciousness. And the consciousness most fully engaged with its material produces the most vital and alive prose style because the expression has nowhere to hide and nothing to protect.

Smedley’s style is more graceful than Hemingway’s because its directness is earned not mannered. It’s the formal expression of consciousness that has no cause or willingness to dress itself up. It’s not applying for a job at the literary academy or seeking prestige in fancy monied realms. McKay’s style is more vital than Fitzgerald’s because its dynamic energy is the organic expression of a consciousness fully alive to its material rather than a lyrical program applied to material the consciousness observes from a distance. Larsen’s style is more precise and valuable than Faulkner’s because its psychological exactness serves revelation rather than aestheticization. Every formal choice in Passing reveals Irene Redfield’s constrained consciousness, in contrast to Faulkner’s evasive complexity, which poses as engagement with the central realities of human consciousness and society while refusing to confront them.

The Big Bang tradition surpasses the canonical tradition by every standard that literature can be evaluated by — politically, normatively, historically, and formally, aesthetically, and stylistically, in terms of accessibility and engagement and profundity and grace. The canonical tradition is not great literature that happens to serve imperial ideology. It is lesser literature that is mistaken for great literature because the institutional and ideological mechanisms that suppressed, and continue to suppress, the greater literature also created the evaluative framework that makes the lesser literature appear greater. It’s propaganda beyond propaganda. It’s lobotomy and brainwashing, one on top of the other, over and over again. The need is to show the many layers of the material suppression and the many facets of the suppressive mentality and the great accomplishments of the successful resistance to both types of suppression — something that academic canon critique has never done completely or simultaneously.

The styles of the dispossessed novels are naturally lively and deeply meaningful and vital and inoffensive to human dignity. They don’t need fancy or mannered or complex stylizations and devices to add meaning and life, because they are already intensely full of both and not lacking due to the evasions and superficialities or voids or embarrassments or offensiveness of the canonized novels. In the canonical novels there is a relationship between formal complexity and the warping and blocking of content that makes the content’s absence and distortions necessary to disguise. The canonical novels need their formal devices because without them there would be too little there — or worse, something actively embarrassing. The green light needs to be a symbol because without the symbolism the thinness of Gatsby’s actual subject matter, Fitzgerald’s thin treatment of the subject matter — the self-destructiveness and illusions, the menace and hollowness of the entitled class — would be exposed as insufficient to support the weight of a serious novel. The iceberg theory for Hemingway’s minimalist style needs to be a theory because without the theoretical justification the gutted prose would read as simply impoverished rather than as disciplined compression. Faulkner’s stream of consciousness needs to be formally overwhelming because if the reader could see clearly what the consciousness is actually doing — evading, aestheticizing, covering up — the evasion would be exposed rather than celebrated as formal achievement.

The Big Bang tradition of the dispossessed needs none of this because it has nothing to hide and nothing to compensate for. Daughter of Earth has no symbolic apparatus because Marie Rogers’s actual experience is already more than sufficient to carry the weight of a serious novel. The material is so full and so urgent and so completely dramatic that adding symbolic overlay would be redundant and falsifying. Home to Harlem has no iceberg theory in play because there is nothing that needs to be pretended to. Jake’s Harlem is shown completely and directly because McKay’s consciousness has no reason to dehumanize or restrict what it sees. Passing has no mystifying complexity because Larsen’s psychological exactitude is the most direct possible formal expression of a consciousness that is already as complex as any consciousness in American fiction without requiring formal complexity to make it seem so.

The dispossessed writers’ formal simplicity and directness is not a limitation but a sign of their fullest possible engagement with their material. They don’t need ornament because the material is already ornate with human complexity. They don’t need symbols because the reality is already symbolic in the deepest sense — not because a lyrical consciousness has imposed symbolic significance on it but because the material conditions of dispossessed life are already fully charged with meaning that only needs to be shown directly to be felt completely.

The canonical novels’ formal achievements are compensatory in that they add what the material cannot supply. The Big Bang tradition’s formal qualities are expressive in showing what the material is explosive with. That’s the difference between a style of evasion and a style of revelation. That’s the difference between a form that compensates for a void and a form that expresses a fullness. That’s the difference between a consciousness that constructs aesthetic significance to replace the normative significance it has chosen not to engage and a consciousness that shows the normative significance already present in the material it cannot or will not choose not to see.

The offensiveness of the canonical novels is too little discussed in criticism and everywhere else. The canonical novels are formally evasive and distorting and actively offensive in ways that their form partly functions to obscure. Gatsby’s casual racism, the fear of the dark hordes overwhelming white civilization, Buchanan’s Nordic supremacism, is glossed in passing by the lyricism and Jazz Age glamour that obscures and aestheticizes everything including the racism.6 Hemingway’s gender politics, the emasculating women, the stoic male endurance that requires female subordination, is made to seem like existential seriousness rather than misogyny by the minimalist brush. Faulkner’s relationship to slavery and lynching, the aesthetic complexity that makes the avoidance feel like engagement, is made to seem like serious confrontation with Southern history and society rather than its most sophisticated avoidance.

The Big Bang tradition is inoffensive not because it avoids difficult material. It confronts the most difficult material in American life directly and without aesthetic obfuscation. Its formal directness provides no cover for ideological and aesthetic manipulation. You cannot embed or camouflage racism or misogyny or class contempt into Daughter of Earth or Home to Harlem or Passing. It’s clearly there or it’s not. The formal directness that dramatizes the dispossessed consciousness fully leaves nowhere for ideological manipulation to hide. The style that reveals cannot simultaneously conceal, at least not as readily. The form that expresses fullness cannot easily mystify human consciousness and the world. The consciousness that sees so much and shows so much misses and obscures comparatively little. The problem is that the anti-imperialism is also evident and immediate, and this the canon and the imperial establishment cannot abide.

This is why the canonical tradition needs its formal entanglements and its distancing historical settings or situations and why the Big Bang tradition does not. The former is more artistically fancy than the latter the better to hide what the latter does not need to hide. The formal complexity is the sign of normative blanking and distorting more than it is the sign of any literary achievement. The formal directness is the sign of the fullest possible engagement as much as it is the sign of the simplest possible style. The Big Bang tradition is formally simple because it is normatively complete and imperative. The canonical tradition is formally complex because it is normatively twisted and lacking.

With the direct dispossessed literature — though smeared as ideological and propagandistic — the fascination is built in. No fanciness is needed it. It’s lively and full and emotional and complex but not especially fancy because it is already fully fascinating and wholly alive in and of what it is. It’s interesting and the stakes are compelling inherently without any layered in or layered on fanciness, which often comes across as mannered, pretentious, and ironically dull in the canonized novels — and falsely said to be not ideological and not propagandistic.

The canonical novels are often genuinely dull to read. This is the dirty secret of American literary culture that no one in the establishment is allowed to say. The Great Gatsby is short and elegant and frequently tedious. The Sun Also Rises is controlled and precise and frequently boring. The Sound and the Fury is formally ambitious and frequently unreadable not because it is too profound for ordinary readers but because the formal complexity is not in service of material that justifies it. The difficulty is not earned. The fanciness is compensatory and the compensation is for a fundamental absence of inherent fascination. The material is not interesting enough on its own terms to hold the reader without the formal apparatus propping it up.

Students know this and are not allowed to say it. They are told their boredom is a failure of sophistication rather than an accurate response to a formal flaw. The canonical tradition creates the idea that difficulty and mannerism are signs of seriousness and that accessibility and engagement are signs of compromise. This means that the reader’s honest experience of the canonical novels as frequently dull and mannered must be explained as the reader’s failure rather than the novel’s. This is one of the most effective mechanisms of the suppression. It turns the reader’s accurate aesthetic response into evidence of their own inadequacy rather than evidence of the canonical novel’s limitations. Talk about propaganda.

The Big Bang novels don’t do this. They don’t require the reader to override their honest aesthetic response in the name of sophistication. They are immediately and genuinely fascinating because the material is immediately and genuinely fascinating. The dispossessed consciousness fully dramatized, the social world completely alive, the stakes inherently compelling because they are the stakes of actual human lives under pressure from real systems of destruction. You don’t need to be told that Daughter of Earth is important before you find it gripping. You don’t need a critical stance to make Home to Harlem feel alive. You don’t need to be educated into finding The Blacker the Berry significant, dynamic, lively, serious. The fascination is built into the material itself and the formal directness serves that fascination rather than substituting for it.

This is a direct democratic argument for the Big Bang tradition and a damning argument against the canonical tradition. The canonical novels require institutional support to maintain their status as great literature. They need the syllabus, the critical apparatus, the prize culture, the MFA pedagogy to tell readers that their honest experience of boredom and mannerism is wrong. The Big Bang novels require none of this because they earn the reader’s engagement directly through the inherent fascination of their material and the formal directness that shows it completely. This is great literature that reads like great literature without needing to tell anyone that it is great literature. The canonical novels are institutionally certified great literature that often reads like mannered, pretentious, and ironically dull exercises in formal compensation for a fundamental absence of inherent human interest. They need the suppression of greater works and novelists and all the propaganda the establishment can muster to get by.

And the pretentiousness. Pretension in literature is the gap between what form pretends to do and what it actually does. The style poses as more significant than the material supports. The form grasps for profundity that the content doesn’t earn. The aesthetic complexity performs depth while evading material that would produce actual depth. Gatsby is pretentious this way. The lyrical and symbolic approach seeks to express the deepest truths about American life or the American Dream while instead aestheticizing the self-destruction of the privileged class at a comfortable distance from the material that might otherwise make the critique hard hitting and real. Hemingway is pretentious in this way too. The minimalist style pretends to compress essential human truths while actually gutting the consciousness that would produce those truths if it were allowed to see and say fully what it sees. Faulkner is the most pretentious in this sense. The complex ostensibly sophisticated weave through Southern history and society and psychology falsifies and obscures reality as much as it does anything else.

The Big Bang novels of the suppressed dispossessed are not pretentious because there is no gap between the form and the content. Daughter of Earth directly dramatizes the full consciousness of a dispossessed woman finding her way from rural poverty to revolutionary political commitment, and it delivers exactly that — completely, directly, without formal contortion that poses as more than it is. Home to Harlem dramatizes a lively Black working class community from inside and does so with a formal vitality expressive of itself. The style is honest because the material is honest. The form reveals the content rather than attempting to become it in its absence. The fascination is earned psychologically and socially, humanistically rather than stylistically, though with its own inherent natural style that is ever alert and engaged to the subject, and personalized to McKay and to the matter and energy of the subject.

The Big Bang novels are better because they are more interesting, more alive, more honest, more direct, more engaging, more emotionally real, more formally genuine, and more profoundly human than the canonical novels, and they achieve all of this without fanciness, without mannerism, without the pretentious formal tics and poses that the canonical tradition deploys to disguise its fundamental absence of inherent human and societal fascination and revelation. They don’t need to be fancy because they are already fully alive. They don’t need to be mannered because they are already completely real, wholly meaningful. They don’t need formal complexity to seem profound because they are already profound in the deepest possible sense. The consciousness is fully at stake, fully awake, fully perceptive, the challenges and civil wars fully engaged, the exploratory and the antagonistic forces met head on, the refusal to aestheticize, distort, or evade alive in every sentence. Nothing is managed, dehumanized. Nothing is evaded, falsified. The prose says what it sees and sees what it says in incisive and valuable ways. The movement is expansive and free-flowing not tunneled or stilted or falsely extravagant. The dispossessed suppressed Big Bang novels reject mannered distraction and distortion as no fit, no use, no resonance, as nothing the situation and reality can tolerate or celebrate. It’s too much not to be suppressed by an exploitative and fraudulent establishment culture.

This doesn’t mean that every reader will resonate with every big bang novel. Banjo is mainly male centric, so many female readers may not resonate with it, for example. The Big Bang novels do not claim to be everything to everyone. They do push the fullest possible understanding of specific human consciousnesses and societal situations from their particular organic positions, and different readers will resonate differently with different works depending on their own experience and consciousness.

Banjo is male-centric in a specific and deliberate way — the Marseille waterfront, the Black diasporic male labor and leisure culture, Ray’s philosophical consciousness working through pan-African internationalism. All this is shown from inside a specifically male organic position. Female readers may find less direct resonance with that specific consciousness than male readers do or than they find with Larsen’s female interiority or Smedley’s female consciousness. That is not a failure of the novel. It’s the honest formal consequence of dramatizing a specific organic position completely rather than pretending to a false universality that the canonical tradition claims and never delivers.

That Wallace Thurman, a male writer in his late twenties, dramatizes Emma Lou Morgan’s young Black female consciousness in The Blacker the Berry with such psychological integrity, perceptivity, and life is a result of his skillful handling of the organic dispossessed position — the shared experience of racial dispossession and the shared consciousness of being judged and found wanting by a white supremacist system that does not distinguish between its victims by gender when it comes to the fundamental violence of its judgment. The organic position is not identical across gender but it is connected across the shared experience of dispossession in ways that make genuine cross-gender empathy possible from within the dispossessed tradition in ways it is not possible from outside it. As Victor Hugo demonstrates in Les Misérables, an anti-hegemonic writer can go a long way toward dramatizing consciousnesses organically different from their own — Fantine’s desperate poverty and abuse, Cosette’s traumatized childhood, Éponine’s unrequited love and class resentment — through the force of political consciousness and human empathy working together, the writer’s own organic opposition to the system that smashes so many providing the imaginative access that privilege would otherwise block. The anti-hegemonic position is not identical to every dispossessed position it dramatizes but it is connected to all of them through the shared recognition that the system is criminal and that its victims deserve the fullest most vital possible human expression regardless of whether the writer shares their specific experience of its dehumanization and lethality.

This is also how Thurman dramatizes Emma Lou, how McKay creates the women in his novels with more dignity and interiority than most canonical male writers achieve, how all the great dispossessed writers portray their “other” characters with a political empathy that entitled hegemonic imperial writers struggle or simply fail to achieve. The anti-hegemonic consciousness has imaginative access to other dispossessed positions that the hegemonic consciousness is structurally prevented from achieving because its own comfort and privilege depend on not seeing what the dispossessed position sees. Hugo can show Fantine completely because his political consciousness requires that full sight. The canonical writer cannot show the dispossessed completely because their ideological and aesthetic position requires them not to. Thus, great politics does not hurt literature. It helps it. One could write a book on this subject, and maybe this is it.

And so it’s curious that so many novelists, especially so many American novelists, seem to continuously say and evidently feel the need to say that they don’t write with political or ideological intent. They might as well say they don’t write fully or honestly. The denial of political intent is itself a political act, and one of the most effective ones available to the literary establishment. By claiming that serious literature transcends politics the canonical tradition naturalizes its own political content. It makes the entitled class’s aestheticized self-reflections appear as the universal human condition rather than as the specific ideological product it is. The writer who says they have no political intent does not escape politics and any particular political situation. They are performing the most politically effective two-step of the canon, which is to make their politics invisible by calling them aesthetics, or psychology. We can know what they are doing, even if they can’t, or refuse to admit it.

Gold knew what he was doing. Smedley knew what she was doing. McKay knew what he was doing. Their political intent was not a compromise of their artistic integrity. It was the condition of their greatest formal achievement, the organic necessity that produced the directness and vitality and profundity that the canonical tradition’s aesthetically disinterested writers could never achieve because they had nothing urgent enough to say to require the formal honesty, integrity, and openness that urgency demands.

The canonical tradition’s claim to universality is a form of pretension and a form of suppression both. It’s fake. The Great Gatsby is said to be about the universal American Dream while actually being about the entitled class’s self-obsession. Hemingway is said to show compressed universal human consciousness while actually showing a stunted and stripped white male consciousness almost wholly filtering itself and the world from a place of privilege. The universality claim is bunk. It presents the partial consciousness of the privileged as universal human consciousness and suppresses every other consciousness as particular, regional, political, or insufficiently literary.

The Big Bang tradition makes no such fraudulent universality claim. Each novel dramatizes organic consciousnesses and perceptions of the world from their particular positions with full dramatic and normative force — Smedley’s working class revolutionary female consciousness, McKay’s Black diasporic male consciousness, Larsen’s mixed race middle class female consciousness under the triple bind of race, gender, and class aspiration, Gold’s Jewish immigrant working class male consciousness, Hughes’s Black vernacular consciousness carrying the blues tradition, Thurman’s Black bohemian critical consciousness, McNickle’s Native American consciousness under colonial dispossession. Each is specific. Each is partial in the sense that no single consciousness can contain everything. Each is complete in showing its position in meaningful depth and without distractions, sleights of hand, or refusal to see and know and fully experience. Less superficial style, more real stuff.

The diversity of organic positions within the Big Bang tradition is a great part of its achievement and part of its superiority to the canonical tradition. It shows a full range of American dispossessed consciousness across race, class, gender, and cultural position — which includes broad social and political awareness — rather than falsely universal or narrowed and privileged consciousness as the measure of American and human experience and understanding. Together the Big Bang novels show more of American life more fully and more honestly than the entire canonical tradition combined. Each reader can find different entry points and different resonances depending on their own position and experience, an unusually valuable and varied tradition — very non-canonical.

Even though the Big Bang tradition is objectively superior by every literary standard, every Big Bang novel will not resonate equally with every reader — the novels are specific, particular, and organically positioned in ways that mean different readers will find different entry points into a tradition vital and various enough to meet them where they are. Both things are true simultaneously and the second doesn’t contradict the first. These novels are different planets formed from a multi-faceted socio-political explosion. They filled a largely inhospitable void, before being suppressed for the sake of far lesser worlds made canon.

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The Blacker the Berry — Wallace Thurman

In 1925 at age twenty-three — he would be dead in nine years — Wallace Thurman arrived in Harlem via Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and a few other urban locations where he lived growing up. In Harlem he roomed with Langston Hughes and immediately became a central and paradoxical figure in the Harlem Renaissance, one of its most energetic artists and institution builders and its most exposing internal critic simultaneously.

In Los Angeles where he lived for a few years after graduating from high school in Salt Lake City and a brief stint at the University of Utah, Thurman attempted to build a West Coast Black literary infrastructure from scratch, working in the post office by day, then as a Black newspaper columnist and a Black literary magazine founder by night, before moving to Harlem.

In Harlem he edited and published the one and only issue of “Fire!! A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists” (1926) and Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life (1928-1929). Both lacked the financial resources to continue. Thurman’s play Harlem opened in Harlem in February 1929 before transferring to Broadway’s Eltinge Theatre where it ran for 93 performances — one of the first plays by a Black playwright to achieve a substantial Broadway run. It represented the younger generation’s push beyond respectability politics toward a more sexually frank, more working class, and more artistic and open literature. Thurman became Managing Editor at The Messenger, a Black union journal, worked at other journals, and also as a reader and editor at the white publishing house Macaulay — which published his three novels — one of the very few Black editors in mainstream New York publishing, all the while writing critical essays that made him in some ways the Renaissance’s sharpest and most unwelcome pen.

Thurman and others of the “Niggerati” (the deliberately ironic name he used for the young African American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance) wanted to show the real lives of African Americans, both the good and the bad. Thurman believed that black artists should fully acknowledge and celebrate the arduous conditions of African-American lives. As Singh and Scott wrote, “Thurman’s Harlem Renaissance is, thus, staunch and revolutionary in its commitment to individuality and critical objectivity: the black writer need not pander to the aesthetic preferences of the black middle class, nor should he or she write for an easy and patronizing white approval.”

Wallace Thurman’s three novels dramatized and critiqued social dynamics and institutions in Harlem that made the most establishment members of the Harlem Renaissance deeply uncomfortable and that the broader canonical tradition utterly slighted. His first novel The Blacker the Berry (1929) drew directly on his own experience as a dark-skinned man in a community impacted by colorism, that internalized white hierarchies of skin tone. He shows Emma Lou Morgan’s visceral self-criticism and self-hatred with a psychological focus and intensity and a social delineation and vividness that explored and explained what the Renaissance’s public celebration of Harlem preferred to suppress. Thurman’s depiction of Emma Lou and eventually the Harlem social world is lively, communally descriptive, and critical. The novel is both a wonderful portrait and a damning critique. It’s a great novel, extremely readable, each sentence dripping with commentary and perception, life and intent.

Wallace Thurman was severely ill and bookish throughout his youth:

Thurman’s early life was marked by loneliness, family instability, and illness. He began grade school at age six in Boise, Idaho, but his poor health eventually led to a two-year absence from school. During this time, he returned to live with his grandmother Emma in Salt Lake City. From 1910 to 1914, Thurman lived in Chicago. Continuing to move with his mother, he finished grammar school in Omaha, Nebraska. During this time, he suffered from repeated heart attacks. While living in Pasadena, California in the winter of 1918, Thurman caught influenza during the worldwide Influenza Pandemic. He recovered and returned to Salt Lake City, where he finished high school.

Thurman was a voracious reader. He enjoyed the works of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Havelock Ellis, Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire and many others. He wrote his first novel at the age of 10. He attended the University of Utah from 1919 to 1920 as a pre-medical student. In 1922 he transferred to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and took a few journalism courses, but left without earning a degree. He was also a postal clerk for three years.

Thurman’s vibrant novel The Blacker the Berry [the sweeter the juice] follows Emma Lou Morgan, a dark-skinned Black woman from a light-skinned Black family in Boise, Idaho, through her migration to Harlem and her nonstop experience of colorism: discrimination and rejection not only from white society but mainly from the Black community, which internalized the white hierarchy of skin tone and turned it on its own. Emma Lou is alert and smart, ambitious and adaptable, and yet her darkness is treated by herself and society as a deficiency to be overcome or apologized for in every aspect of the social world she moves through, from her own mother’s shame, to Los Angeles college social circles, to various types of job opportunities and lack thereof, to the men she pursues who prefer lighter women, to the Harlem social circles that rank their members by complexion. Thurman dramatizes this intellectual and emotional passion play with a ferocity and zest that is partly autobiographical. His satiric edge paints Emma Lou in myriad psychological shades ranging from naive to outraged. The novel dramatizes her suffering and the community involved and all those responsible. Wallace was dark-skinned, lived widely, and knew the entire dynamic from the inside out, coast to coast in America.

The novel is an act of interior critique and social vision that explored a human reality that the Harlem Renaissance’s typical celebration of Black culture and Black beauty preferred not to foreground, that the hierarchy of whiteness had been absorbed into Black social life, that racism produced residual effects Black Americans inflicted on each other. Thurman wrote The Blacker the Berry at twenty-six, died at thirty-two, and left behind this brilliant novel and two others both psychologically and culturally critical, lively novels with a purpose, along with multiple plays and produced screenplays, essays, and much more. His was a consciousness and understanding of society so vital and clear-eyed, so powerful and endlessly relevant that it makes his very early death one of the great losses in American literature.

The Harlem Renaissance was a potent cultural force that helped make the 1929 Big Bang in the American literary novel possible. The Renaissance was not a single movement with a unified program but a wide-ranging explosion of culture spanning roughly from the end of World War One through the early 1930s. Black American artists, writers, musicians, and intellectuals produced a sprawling kaleidoscope of works that permanently transformed American culture and made Black and other literary achievements of 1929 and after increasingly possible and inevitable. It provided a lot of the cultural infrastructure that helped Hughes and Thurman, Larsen and McKay create and amplify what they wrote when they wrote it. In these edgier aspects the Renaissance helped save American literature, helped create it or finally fulfil it, or would have if it had been allowed to — the Harlem Renaissance and the socialist upsurge combined.

The preconditions for the Harlem Renaissance were material, demographic, and geographic as much as cultural. The Great Migration — the movement of hundreds of thousands of Black Americans from the rural South to Northern cities during and after World War One, driven by the combination of Southern racial terror and Northern industrial employment — created in Harlem a concentration of Black population, Black institutions, Black intellectual life, and Black cultural energy that had no precedent in American history. This was an unusually diverse community large enough and dense enough to sustain its own publishing infrastructure, its own theater, its own music venues, its own political organizations, its own intellectual debates. This was the material ground on which the Renaissance grew, heavily augmented for the good and bad by white patrons, white foundations, and the white publishing industry. All the while the socialist surge of the preceding decades shaped the Renaissance profoundly, and the Renaissance shaped it in return. Meanwhile the canonized novels were doing something different from and inadequate to what the socialist moment made imperative. Charlie Chaplin’s utterly dispossessed tramp figure who starred in his great silent films through those same decades showed that the dispossessed were the real stars — the moral, social, and psychological center of the most fully human stories — and that the canonical novels’ failure to center them or revealingly explore the world that created the dispossessed masses was not aesthetic judgment but ideological choice, and normative weakness and failure. It would take the collapse of the economy and the widespread reality of the Great Depression for an establishment novelist like John Steinbeck to marginally pick up on what had always been common sense to the great people’s novelists of the Big Bang — for whom no new and larger economic catastrophe was needed to reveal what the system was doing to the dispossessed, because they were already living inside it, as should have been evident to all, even to those observing it from relative or extreme privilege.

The combined forces and powers, the full human consciousness and social understanding, the organizations and publications of the Harlem Renaissance and the decades of socialist uprising combined to create the greatest literary moment in American history — the Big Bang of the American novel. The Harlem Renaissance and the socialist surge of the preceding decades were mutual forces often melding together that helped shape and produce the conditions for the Big Bang. Anarchist Emma Goldman’s left literary reviews in the early 1900s along with Upton Sinclair’s socialist-tinged naturalist novels at the same time, and other naturalists, all the organizing, unionizing, agitating in the workplace and in government, Chaplin’s films featuring the plight of the tramp. No force alone would have been sufficient. The socialist movement provided the political framework, the universalism, the solidarity and united struggle, and the institutional infrastructure, the radical press, and the class analysis inspiring the writers of the Harlem Renaissance who were the most ambitious and the most humanly serious — that is, politically serious, as is typically said, often as a way of marginalizing rather than properly aggrandizing. The Harlem Renaissance provided the organic cultural production, the experiential and formal vitality, the collective consciousness, its own intellectual insight and internationalist dimension that the socialist political and literary movement needed to surpass the naturalist and muckraking socialist traditions that preceded it.

In this way the Big Bang novels dwarfed or surpassed the achievements of many of the greatest Victorian, modernist, and naturalist novels all. The Big Bang is the concentrated moment where a multicultural diaspora and liberatory socialism fused — especially in McKay who was both Harlem Renaissance and international communist, and in Hughes who was both blues poet and socialist, and in Thurman who was Harlem bohemian and psychological and sociological institutional critic. 1929, or more broadly 1928 to 1930, was the focal moment when the accumulated force of both traditions exploded simultaneously into the greatest concentrated literary achievement in the American novel — the novel, that most sweeping and articulate mode of expression and communication of human consciousness of self and society.

The Harlem Renaissance showed that the organic cultural production of dispossessed communities was both politically momentous and aesthetically superior.

Let’s repeat that. The humanly rooted dispossessed culture and figures in America produced aesthetically superior art, literature, and culture, as compared to the financially lofted entitled, propertied culture and figures.

And the greater more lively and revealing art of the people — more fully conscious and more socially perceptive, more aesthetically and normatively accomplished — was not canonized. That reward went to the truncated and stilted, viscerally and mentally gutted art of the entitled classes — Wharton, James, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Wolfe. The great and vital work of the dispossessed was belittled, smeared, disappeared from consciousness willfully, systematically, criminally. And it lobotomized and crippled American life, while accelerating bigoted, genocidal capitalism. Chaplin was exiled, the tramp was crushed. Smedley was exiled, the daughter of Earth left to die. Hughes was publicly tried in the McCarthy hearings and artistically shackled. New Criticism and Theory valorized the politicized depoliticized and disappeared the fully human, that is, the fundamentally political. America brainwashed and destroyed itself, and much of the world with it. And in doing so it led the charge with its literature and culture, backed up by its guns and by its dollars used as guns.

During the socialist era and the Harlem Renaissance in America, the blues tradition, the vernacular speech, the collective consciousness of Black working class life produced art of greater formal vitality and human truth than the genteel tradition that the white establishment was canonizing. The driven art and culture of the Harlem Renaissance was a crucial contribution to the socialist literary argument because it provided concrete aesthetic evidence that the dispossessed tradition produced the greater literature. The Renaissance-adjacent socialist novels of Gold and Smedley and Tsiang rose from similar historical ground at the same moment, the dispossessed finding power and voice, different expressions of the same convergence of forces that made the Big Bang possible.

McKay’s Home to Harlem in particular demonstrated to the broader socialist literary movement that proletarian fiction could be formally alive, sexually frank, collectively conscious, and aesthetically accomplished — pushing beyond the didactic or sociologically documentary as more typical of the works of the socialist naturalists. This is reflected in Michael Gold’s approach to Jews Without Money — elevating the so-called proletarian novel beyond anything produced by Sinclair, Norris, London, Dreiser, Anderson, and others. This helped shape the broader proletarian literary movement’s understanding of what dispossessed organic fiction could achieve formally and otherwise.

The Harlem Renaissance’s internationalism — pan-African and political — gave the American socialist literary tradition a global dimension it would have otherwise partly lacked. The Big Bang’s internationalism — McKay's Caribbean, Soviet, and Mediterranean worlds, Hughes’s travels from Africa to Europe to Asia, Larsen’s Danish roots and experience — is in part a Harlem Renaissance inheritance. The socialism was also international in its own right: McKay’s address to the Communist International in the Soviet Union, Hughes’s extended Soviet stay and Central Asian and far east travels, Smedley’s Europe, India, and China connections and travels, Gold’s flight to Mexico to avoid the World War One draft. The European ramblings of Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Wolfe seem pedestrian by comparison. Even Hemingway’s more substantial war experience, genuine as it was, passed through a minimalist consciousness that managed and aestheticized what it witnessed rather than revealing and indicting what Gold or Smedley or McKay would have made of the same material.

The socialist surge and the Harlem Renaissance were not simply aligned. There were real tensions. Howard professor Alain Locke’s cultural nationalism emphasized Black aesthetic achievement and individual artistic dignity in ways that were compatible with white patronage and the philanthropic infrastructure of foundations like the Harmon Foundation. This wing of the Renaissance was suspicious of socialist politics as subordinating Black culture to a universalist class framework that was in practice often dominated by white leftists, although this part of the Renaissance also embraced traditional white art forms.

The more radical wing — McKay, Thurman, Hughes at his most politically engaged — explored the connection between racial and class oppression and was skeptical of the respectability politics that Locke’s cultural nationalism tended to produce. This is the wing most directly part of the proletarian literary movement — explicitly political, often communist — and the Big Bang’s commitment to the fullest possible human consciousness of self and cultural and social reality.

The Industrial Workers of the World — the Wobblies — were among the first major American labor organizations to actively recruit Black workers and argue that race was a weapon that the capitalist class used to divide the working class. This gave Black workers and intellectuals a framework for understanding racial oppression as structurally connected to class exploitation rather than as a separate and purely racial problem. That framework shaped McKay, Hughes, and Gold’s relationship to the Harlem writers, the New Masses circle overlapping with the Harlem Renaissance circle. The Socialist Party under Eugene Debs actively engaged Black membership and Debs named racism as incompatible with socialism — a political framework that some Harlem Renaissance intellectuals and artists embraced and expanded.

A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen’s political and literary magazine The Messenger — founded 1917 — was explicitly socialist and explicitly Black, arguing that Black liberation required working class solidarity and socialist politics rather than the accommodationist Booker T. Washington approach or even the more militant but still bourgeois NAACP approach. The Messenger was one of the most important institutional efforts connecting socialist politics to Black intellectual life leading into and through the Harlem Renaissance. Randolph’s socialist politics directly influenced the Harlem Renaissance’s most liberatory elements.

The progressive, socialist, and communist press infrastructure — The Masses, The Liberator, New Masses — published Black writers and provided institutional support that the white mainstream literary establishment refused. Claude McKay was a contributing editor at The Liberator with Max Eastman. This gave Harlem Renaissance writers access to a radical white readership and a culturally and socially — politically — serious institutional framework outside the Harlem-specific venues.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 had a great effect on Black radical thought and socialist thought everywhere — not because Black intellectuals necessarily endorsed Soviet communism but because the successful overthrow of a capitalist imperial power by workers and peasants demonstrated that the apparently fixed order of things could be overturned. McKay visited the Soviet Union in 1922-23 and addressed the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, where he spoke about the relationship between racial oppression and capitalist imperialism to an international revolutionary audience. That experience directly shaped Banjo’s internationalist anti-imperial consciousness. Beginning in 1928, Agnes Smedley would live and work in China for many years as an international correspondent with an anti-imperial consciousness documenting anticolonial struggle, while Langston Hughes would live in the Soviet Union for months in1932, then traveled across central and far east Asia. Socialism and the Harlem Renaissance, internationalism and pan-Africanism, and the outrageous and unjust facts of dispossession opened people’s minds and hearts and led to the greatest concentrated literary achievement in the American novel — the Big Bang — before capitalism collapsed the economy, as it periodically does, and retrograde imperial forces crushed what remained.

In addition to The Blacker the Berry, Wallace Thurman wrote Infants of the Spring (1932), a witty, funny, and energetic roman à clef in which thinly disguised Renaissance figures debate art and race and liberation in and around a Harlem rooming house while producing almost nothing, their bohemianism exposed as performance, their racial politics confused and self-serving, the prose alive with the talk and argument and posturing of the community shown from inside with pointed and affectionate honesty. This might even be thought of as the first Substack novel, decades before Substack, given all the hot air floating around the online platform. The Interne (1932), co-written with Abraham Furman, turned Thurman’s eye on hospital institutional corruption. The Interne belongs to the muckraking tradition while maintaining Thurman’s characteristic unsparing institutional critique. The hospital, the same one in which Thurman would die within two years, another institution exposed from inside.

Wallace Thurman died of tuberculosis at thirty-two in 1934, after writing “Description of a Male Tuberculosis Ward” against the advice of his doctors — a catastrophe for the age and ages that would follow. The Harlem Renaissance lost its most energetic and determined internal critic and anatomist. American literature lost a writer of searing intelligence and comic vitality, with infinite potential. That Wallace Thurman remains less central to the canonical account of the Harlem Renaissance than teachers and writers like Alain Locke and Countee Cullen whose respectability politics he exposed shows a familiar pattern of suppression against highly conscious truth-telling and institutional criticism found everywhere.

The opening of The Blacker the Berry:

More acutely than ever before Emma Lou began to feel that her luscious black complexion was somewhat of a liability, and that her marked color variation from the other people in her environment was a decided curse. Not that she minded being black, being a Negro necessitated having a colored skin, but she did mind being too black. She couldn’t understand why such should be the case, couldn’t comprehend the cruelty of the natal attenders who had allowed her to be dipped, as it were, in indigo ink when there were so many more pleasing colors on nature’s palette. Biologically, it wasn’t necessary either; her mother was quite fair, so was her mother’s mother, and her mother’s brother, and her mother’s brother’s son; but then none of them had had a black man for a father. Why had her mother married a black man? Surely there had been some eligible brown-skin men around. She didn’t particularly desire to have had a “high yaller” father, but for her sake certainly some more happy medium could have been found.

Nella Larsen’s novel Passing is tense from its first pages and remains so to its ambiguous ending. Irene Redfield, a light-skinned Black woman living in Harlem, encounters her childhood friend Clare Kendry, who has passed entirely into white society, married a white man who does not know she is Black, and constructed a white life of wealth and social position. The novel dramatizes the dangerous renewal of their friendship, including Clare’s problematic eagerness to return to Black social life. Irene’s response to Clare is moral disapproval complicated by desire, rivalry, and fear. Larsen expresses this with a psychological deftness that challenges the best of any novel.

Near the end of the novel, Clare falls or is pushed from a window at a Harlem party. Hard to say if it was an accident, suicide, or murder, and it’s also unclear what Irene felt or did in that moment, though the possible implications are unsettling. The indeterminate ending keeps the focus on psychology and sociology rather than resolving into moral verdict, though the morality is fully in play, and is indeterminate and ambiguous for both women. Somebody or something has committed murder or suicide here — but who and what? An unexpected murder mystery in a deeply social and psychological drama. Passing is the most compressed of the Big Bang novels and tops Virginia Woolf in its intimate focus on the human interior by making modernist techniques more socially engaged. The novel is powerfully and vitally normative, while it beats the canonized novels at their own formalist game.

Larsen shows the discomfort and pain of passing as a racial and psychological sleight of hand along with its intense economic and emotional pressures, all intertwined. Clare trades one form of self-erasure for another, and the freedom she attempts turns out to be its own form of imprisonment. The novel is compact, controlled, and wrenching, doing at novella length the work of a novel.

Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand is fifty percent longer than Passing, though still a short novel. It uses the last stanza of Langston Hughes’ poem “Cross” (1926) as epigraph that shows the condition of being dispossessed by class position and racial indeterminacy:

My old man died in a fine big house.
My ma died in a shack.
I wonder where I’m gonna die,
Being neither white nor black?

Both Quicksand and Passing produce the sensation of watching someone drown in slow motion while being unable to intervene. Society’s pressures are as visceral as analytical. You feel the psychological and sociological traps of hurting and hiding the ways you identify and present. It’s a different but also compelling artistic and intellectual achievement than Gold’s desperate and brutal community manifestation or Smedley’s psychological and sociological outrage. Those novels make you appalled and angry, while Larsen’s novels make you apprehensive and afraid as witness to multiple dispossessed consciousnesses being constantly tested, suffocated and ground down.

Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen worked the same stream-of-consciousness interiority in the same moment — Mrs. Dalloway published in 1925, Quicksand in 1928, Passing in 1929 — Larsen doing it from inside a racial and gender double-bind of consciousness that is both more constrained and more fully pressured than Clarissa Dalloway’s. The formal achievement is easily comparable. The human stakes are incomparably higher in Larsen. Taken together, Quicksand and Passing form the full arc of Larsen’s suppressed achievement, the psychological novels of racial identity before and after the act of passing, one of the most intense psychological and emotional achievements the Big Bang window produced, and equally socially incisive. The novels of Agnes Smedley and Nella Larsen form two poles of women’s consciousness in the moment: Smedley direct socialist and working class, Larsen psychologically constricted and middle class in aspiration, both showing the system’s destruction of women’s full human possibilities from different dispossessed organic positions. The American canon did not want to hear it. It had the work of propertied empire to enshrine, or embalm, with arch-patrician Maxwell Perkins and his kindred corporate functionaries at Scribner’s leading the way, along with the Pulitzer committee, still performing its imperial duties today.

Virginia Woolf was canonized. Nella Larsen was buried. Both worked stream-of-consciousness interiority in the same moment and Larsen did it better, from inside the racial and gender double-bind that makes Helga Crane’s consciousness more bound and more fully pressured than Clarissa Dalloway’s. The formal achievement is at minimum equal. The human stakes are incomparably higher. Clarissa’s privileged consciousness is pressured by time and memory and private considerations, while Helga’s consciousness is pressured by race and sex and class simultaneously, massively oppressive public monstrosities, with no exit and no resolution. Woolf faced the constraint of sex with great clarity and force, but Larsen faced race and sex and class simultaneously, the triple bind producing a more total and inescapable assault on consciousness than any single line of oppression alone. There is no aesthetic explanation for the difference in canonical standing. There is only the web of suppression doing what it was designed to do: Prioritize the privileged, dismiss everyone else. Politicize the canon by pretending to depoliticize it. Protect white empire by smearing its conscious antagonists. Bury the truth: “White people were so stupid about such things for all that they usually asserted that they were able to tell…” — Larsen writes in Passing.

Quicksand and Passing show Larsen’s suppressed achievement — the psychological novels of racial identity in and around the act of passing, filleting an unjust society through the most tightly spun interiority the Big Bang produced. Compare Quicksand directly to Mrs. Dalloway. Why one is the foundation of the modernist canon and the other is a specialist text in African American literature courses? The answer is not craft. The answer is not form. The answer is the fake canon working as designed, protecting its hierarchies by making the question seem impolite, or political, or ignorant. The point is not that Larsen got robbed, though she did, as did many others. The point is that the entire canon was hollowed out and inverted — the greatest literature buried, the lesser elevated, the hierarchy of value reversed. The American mind was hollowed out — white people really were made stupid, and callous, and imperial, the bigotry perpetuated — right along with American culture and consciousness, society and politics. Consequently a supremacist capitalist empire was maintained and extended into ever greater power, liberatory socialism crushed, and the canon of American literature partnered through it all, and continues to do so through an unending series of past and current mechanisms of imperial suppression, imperial propaganda, and imperial control — still actively genociding and destroying the world today.

From Passing:

And gradually there rose in Irene a small inner disturbance, odious and hatefully familiar. She laughed softly, but her eyes flashed.

Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that here before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro?

Absurd! Impossible! White people were so stupid about such things for all that they usually asserted that they were able to tell; and by the most ridiculous means: fingernails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth, and other equally silly rot. They always took her for an Italian, a Spaniard, a Mexican, or a Gypsy. Never, when she was alone, had they even remotely seemed to suspect that she was a Negro. No, the woman sitting there staring at her couldn’t possibly know.

Nevertheless, Irene felt, in turn, anger, scorn, and fear slide over her.

…

Irene, who was struggling with a flood of feelings, resentment, anger, and contempt, was, however, still able to answer as coolly as if she had not that sense of not belonging to and of despising the company in which she found herself drinking iced tea from tall amber glasses on that hot August afternoon. Her husband, she informed them quietly, couldn’t exactly “pass.”

From Quicksand:

Helga Crane couldn’t, she told herself and others, live in America. In spite of its glamour, existence in America, even in Harlem, was for Negroes too cramped, too uncertain, too cruel; something not to be endured for a lifetime if one could escape; something demanding a courage greater than was in her. No. She couldn’t stay. Nor, she saw now, could she remain away. Leaving, she would have to come back. This knowledge, this certainty of the division of her life into two parts in two lands, into physical freedom in Europe and spiritual freedom in America, was unfortunate, inconvenient, expensive.

…

She hoped that some good Christian would speak to her, invite her to return, or inquire kindly if she was a stranger in the city. None did, and she became bitter, distrusting religion more than ever. She was herself unconscious of that faint hint of offishness which hung about her and repelled advances, an arrogance that stirred in people a peculiar irritation.

…

In that period of racking pain and calamitous fright Helga had learned what passion and credulity could do to one. In her was born angry bitterness and an enormous disgust. The cruel, unrelieved suffering had beaten down her protective wall of artificial faith in the infinite wisdom, in the mercy, of God. For had she not called in her agony on Him? And He had not heard. Why? Because, she knew now, He wasn’t there. Didn’t exist. Into that yawning gap of unspeakable brutality had gone, too, her belief in the miracle and wonder of life. Only scorn, resentment, and hate remained—and ridicule. Life wasn’t a miracle, a wonder. It was, for Negroes at least, only a great disappointment. Something to be got through with as best one could. No one was interested in them or helped them. God! Bah! And they were only a nuisance to other people.

Everything in her mind was hot and cold, beating and swirling about.

Within her emaciated body raged disillusion. Chaotic turmoil.

The literary achievements in and around the Harlem Renaissance were often formal and conservative though also often rebellious, even revolutionary — wide and various in content, politics, and form. Apart from the many works of the novelists and poets of the Big Bang, prominent works included Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), a formally but not politically radical novel, a hybrid of poetry and prose and drama expressing Black life in the South and North. Countee Cullen wrote poetry that embraced the Western literary tradition for Black poets. Zora Neale Hurston lived a life of academia, anthropological fieldwork, travel, and often and ultimately poverty. Her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) has been both praised and criticized for its Black vernacular and narrative approach. The Harlem Renaissance was often conducted in a more elevated social manner, rather than wholly dispossessed, exemplified by traditional if “radical” Black scholars like W.E.B. Du Bois, and in no small part shaped by the funding of white individuals and organizations — including patrons, philanthropists, publishing houses, and other corporations. This created both a tension and the predictable effects between the cultural productions and the interests of those funding it.

The funding structure goes a long way toward explaining the Renaissance’s tendency toward cultural celebration — a kind of identity politics — over full socialist engagement, which it often cut against, and toward demonstrating Black achievement aligned to white audiences rather than to the kind of liberatory socialist critique that Gold and Smedley and McKay were producing. White patrons and white publishers wanted certain things from Black cultural production. The financial dependence of Renaissance writers on white money shaped — not absolutely controlled but significantly shaped — what got written and what got published and what got celebrated. This structural dynamic was not unique to the Renaissance. White establishment funding has consistently sought to temper and manage or eliminate Black radical movements throughout American history. White funding would do the same thing to the Black Lives Matter movement nearly a century later — attempt to leash it at the national level, and thereby undercut its more transformative local chapters. The Black Lives Matter movement received hundreds of millions of dollars from major corporations and the Ford Foundation — funding that shifted organizational energy at the national level toward institutional nonprofit structures and policy advocacy rather than toward the movement’s most radical anti-capitalist and abolitionist demands. And so it goes in white empire.

Nella Larsen’s writing was supported by organizations and figures in the Harlem Renaissance even as her novels quietly worked against it from within. She used the refined psychological form the Renaissance valued as being thoroughly modern to expose what its respectability politics and uplift ideology were doing to Black women’s inner lives. Wallace Thurman’s rebellion was public and polemical, while Larsen’s was interior and formal. Both were potent internal critics of the Renaissance establishment, Thurman from outside its proprieties, Larsen from within them.

Thurman’s sardonic Infants of the Spring satire was in part directed at the Renaissance’s dependence on white approval and white money, the way that dependence distorted what Black writers could afford to say. Langston Hughes had a bitter break with one such patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason, when he continued to move politically to the left in his art. Claude McKay’s move to Europe and Africa and the Marseille waterfront rather than stay in New York and cultivate the white patronage networks was in part a rejection of subordinating his art to control by the wealthy, a choice of poverty and freedom over comfort and subservience.

The funding structure of the Harlem Renaissance is one of the clearest illustrations of the Gramscian hegemony theory operating in cultural production, not through crude censorship or explicit political direction but through financial levers managing what can be produced and what gets distributed. The Renaissance that white money funded was the Renaissance that white audiences wanted: exotic, musical, emotionally overt, demonstrating Black humanity as acceptable to white liberal sensibility. The Renaissance that white money did not fund — Wallace Thurman’s uncomfortable interior critique, Claude McKay’s pan-African revolutionary consciousness, the explicitly socialist political analysis connecting Black oppression to capitalist exploitation — found its audience in the liberatory socialist press or in small publications that collapsed after one or two issues for lack of funds, like Fire!!

Money functions as ideology, the one enforces the other. Who pays for the art shapes what art gets made, and often what art get canonized. The Harlem Renaissance’s white funding is part of the explanation for both its achievements and its limitations. And the same forces shape the dominant canon and society in general. In fact these ideological and financial forces are the primary shapers of the establishment canon, and social and political consciousness, not literary and artistic or intellectual and normative merit, far from it, as can be seen by comparing the suppressed and excluded novels of the dispossessed — Gold, Smedley, Hughes, McKay, Thurman, Larsen, and others — to the institutionally promoted and exalted, entitled and propertied, the lobotomized and retrograde novels of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, and the rest.

The political and intellectual debates within the Harlem Renaissance were as important as the literary production and are directly relevant to understanding what the 1929 novels attempted and achieved. W.E.B. Du Bois’s vision of the Talented Tenth — the Black intellectual and professional elite as the vanguard of racial uplift — stood in contrast with the more populist and working-class vision that McKay, Hughes, and Thurman dramatized. As noted recently, Du Bois stated that he felt dirty after reading McKay’s popular truth-of-the-streets novel Home to Harlem. The question of whether Black cultural production should be made like dominant white culture — the integrationist impulse — or should insist on distinctively Black cultural form and content — the separatist or nationalist impulse — ran through many Harlem Renaissance debates and is ongoing. Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry and Larsen’s Passing are both in part responses to the Renaissance’s internal contradictions, dramatizing whether the Renaissance’s celebration of white patronized Black achievement left behind the darkest-skinned, the poorest, the most fully excluded members of the community it claimed to represent.

Nella Larsen occupied a quieter position in the Harlem Renaissance than Thurman, but her two novels are intensely psychologically sophisticated and socially penetrating and a strong exploration of what the Renaissance celebration of Black achievement often sought to exclude. Larsen was the Renaissance novelist of interiority and of the unspeakable, dramatizing the psychological and social tension of things that could not be more openly said in the Renaissance’s public discourse about race and class and gender. Quicksand shows the impossible position of an educated mixed-race Black woman caught between worlds with a psychological depth the Renaissance’s more conventional fiction did not attempt or approach. Passing pushed further into the realms the Renaissance typically avoided, its exploration of racial passing tied to desire and rivalry and fear between women. The deliberately ambiguous ending of Passing forces questions about race and violence that the Renaissance establishment, let alone the broader white literary culture, did not much engage.

Nella Larsen was spuriously accused of plagiarism in 1930 which may have helped end her literary career, before she turned to a long career in nursing. It’s worth seeing those details sorted out by those who studied it:

In 1930, Larsen published “Sanctuary”, a short story for which she was accused of plagiarism. “Sanctuary” was said to resemble the British writer Sheila Kaye-Smith’s short story, “Mrs. Adis”, first published in the United Kingdom in 1919. Kaye-Smith wrote on rural themes, and was very popular in the US. Some critics thought the basic plot of “Sanctuary,” and some of the descriptions and dialogue, were virtually identical to Kaye-Smith’s work.

The scholar H. Pearce has disputed this assessment, writing that, compared to Kaye-Smith’s tale, “Sanctuary” is “... longer, better written and more explicitly political, specifically around issues of race – rather than class as in ‘Mrs Adis’.” Pearce thinks that Larsen reworked and updated the tale into a modern American black context. Pearce also notes that in Kaye-Smith’s 1956 book, All the Books of My Life, the author said she had based “Mrs Adis” on a 17th-century story by St Francis de Sales, Catholic bishop of Geneva. It is unknown whether she knew of the Larsen controversy in the United States. Larsen herself said the story came to her as “almost folk-lore”, recounted to her by a patient when she was a nurse.

Forum magazine investigated, accepted Larsen’s explanation, and cleared her. The University of Virginia School of Nursing offers great detail on this literary matter, including Larsen’s informative letter of explanation. The accusation was baseless and formally resolved in her favor, but being cleared evidently did nothing for Larsen’s literary momentum. The accusation against a Black woman writer in 1930 with no institutional protection, no powerful allies, no financial cushion, may have been enough to entirely derail her career. She published nothing afterward. She wrote a third novel, but it was rejected by her publisher and has never been found. Easily among the greatest novels of the age, Quicksand and Passing were forgotten, out of print for decades. More than forty years later Nella Larsen’s novels would be republished and then slowly incorporated a bit into the canon, which is more than can be said for the other diverse and often more explicitly discursive suppressed novels of the literary Big Bang.

Thurman, Larsen, Gold, Smedley, McKay, Hughes, McNickle, Tsiang, and others — this is the real canon of the American literary novel of the 1920s and 1930s, and for all time — the greatest novelists of the people and of literature in America. Compared to them and their works, the works of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck are mere curiosities of empire, canonized and falsely universalized. They are the fake canon, the canon of white empire. They are comparatively deficient as literature and in virtually every literary sense — as aesthetic achievement, as normative vision, and as the inseparable union of the two that the greatest literature always achieves and the fake canon never does. The establishment canon is among the most consequential lies of empire that serves to gut consciousness and perception of self and society. The lie has held for nearly a century. It will not hold forever. Or if it does, the world is doomed.1

The opening of Passing:

It was the last letter in Irene Redfield’s little pile of morning mail. After her other ordinary and clearly directed letters the long envelope of thin Italian paper with its almost illegible scrawl seemed out of place and alien. And there was, too, something mysterious and slightly furtive about it. A thin sly thing which bore no return address to betray the sender.

Not that she hadn’t immediately known who its sender was. Some two years ago she had one very like it in outward appearance. Furtive, but yet in some peculiar, determined way a little flaunting. Purple ink. Foreign paper of extraordinary size.

It had been, Irene noted, postmarked in New York the day before. Her brows came together in a tiny frown. The frown, however, was more from perplexity than from annoyance; though there was in her thoughts an element of both. She was wholly unable to comprehend such an attitude towards danger as she was sure the letter’s contents would reveal; and she disliked the idea of opening and reading it.

This, she reflected, was of a piece with all that she knew of Clare Kendry. Stepping always on the edge of danger. Always aware, but not drawing back or turning aside.

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Not Without Laughter — Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes died with considerably more public recognition than Michael Gold, though not because of his landmark Big Bang novel Not Without Laughter, which was largely ignored. Hughes was the most celebrated Black American poet of the century, his work in print, his place in the Harlem Renaissance acknowledged, his name known.

The Langston Hughes that the culture celebrated upon his death in 1967, eight days after the death of Michael Gold, was the warm humanist poet, his blues poems, children’s poems, the children’s novel — Popo and Fifina (1932), co-written with Arna Bontemps, in print for 20 years before rumors of Hughes’s ties to the Communist Party began to hurt his reputation, career, and book sales. Hughes was treated by the establishment as the politically suspect but gentle voice of Black American life. This was the domestication of Hughes, the Hughes the establishment could tolerate. Meanwhile, the radical Hughes, the full human artist Hughes — the Hughes of his “Goodbye Christ” poem, his Soviet visit, the Scottsboro poems, the explicitly communist sympathies of the 1930s — had been effectively suppressed and replaced by the safer version.

The “Goodbye Christ” experience of Langston Hughes serves as a case study of how hegemonic de-canonization occurs in both stark moments and over decades and centuries. In 1932, Hughes wrote the poem during his travel to the Soviet Union where he lived for a year, and that year he published the poem in a German magazine. In the poem he basically dismisses Christianity as oppressive and calls for its successor(s):

“Goodbye Christ.”

Listen, Christ,
You did alright in your day, I reckon-
But that day’s gone now.
They ghosted you up a swell story, too,
Called it Bible-
But it’s dead now,
The popes and the preachers’ve
Made too much money from it.
They’ve sold you to too many

Kings, generals, robbers, and killers-
Even to the Tzar and the Cossacks,
Even to Rockefeller’s Church,
Even to THE SATURDAY EVENING POST.
You ain’t no good no more.
They’ve pawned you
Till you’ve done wore out.

Goodbye,
Christ Jesus Lord God Jehova,
Beat it on away from here now.
Make way for a new guy with no religion at all-
A real guy named
Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin Worker ME-
I said, ME!

Go ahead on now,
You’re getting in the way of things, Lord.
And please take Saint Gandhi with you when you go,
And Saint Pope Pius,
And Saint Aimee McPherson,
And big black Saint Becton
Of the Consecrated Dime.
And step on the gas, Christ!
Move!

Don’t be so slow about movin?
The world is mine from now on-
And nobody’s gonna sell ME
To a king, or a general,
Or a millionaire.

The weaponization of this poem, and other work, against Hughes happened in several distinct phases across two decades. In 1940, when Hughes was touring to promote the first book of his autobiography The Big Sea, Aimee Semple McPherson mobilized her Angelus Temple congregation against him in Pasadena, California circulating the poem as evidence that Hughes was an anti-Christian communist. This forced Hughes into a defensive posture he never fully escaped. He repudiated the poem publicly, calling it a youthful error, which then became its own problem because the repudiation could always be used to characterize him as either a covert communist or a coward depending on who was doing the characterizing.

Through the 1940s the poem circulated continuously in right-wing religious and political networks as a ready-made exhibit. Every time Hughes received a public honor, a speaking invitation, or institutional recognition, someone could produce “Goodbye Christ” to demand cancellation. Cancel culture from the right has always been the dominant form of cancel culture — imperialist and capitalist. The American Presidency shows this, one manifestation of it, an unbroken ball-and-chain of white males, with one partial exception — Obama, an establishmentarian black man with a white mother. “Goodbye Christ” functioned against Hughes as portable scarlet letter, always available to cancel him, impossible to fully disown, not that he should be forced to — far from it.

The 1953 Cold War Second Red Scare anti-communist McCarthy hearing was the culmination of establishment cancel culture attacks against Hughes with permanent effects. Hughes was called before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Subcommittee on Investigations to answer questions about Communist influences in his writing. Previously Hughes had been secretly interrogated by the Subcommittee’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, where political concessions were extracted. Roy Cohn would later become the very close attorney and mentor to Donald Trump — and neo-fascist model. Hughes may have topped the neofascist House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) list of alleged Communists and fellow travelers with a file showing affiliation with 49 allegedly left-wing organizations running to 2,000 pages.

Hughes refused to name names, but he was faced with the choice of whether or not to preserve his career and livelihood. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had personally leaked information about Hughes’s left-wing ties and criticisms of organized religion to the press and to groups that had invited him to speak, causing many to cancel his appearances. So, Hughes repudiated his past socialist and communist ideas under questioning from McCarthy and Roy Cohn. Hughes denied he had ever been a Communist Party member or even “read the theoretical books of socialism or communism.” The McCarthy testimony by Hughes did its work.

He moved away from overtly political poems and towards more lyric subjects. When selecting his poetry for his Selected Poems (1959) he excluded all his radical socialist verse from the 1930s.

Hughes’s testimony was a careful performance of contrition, acknowledging past radical associations, renouncing the poem again, but refusing to name other leftists. He was technically cleared but the hearing accomplished its real purpose. It put his radicalism on the public record under oath, forced a permanent and humiliating self-censorship, and signaled to publishers, institutions, and funders that Hughes was a liability.

After 1953, Hughes’s work visibly contracted. The sharp political edges of his 1930s poetry — Scottsboro Limited, the New Masses work, the explicitly communist poems — disappeared. He retreated into his banal Harlem Jesse B. Semple [Simple] stories, children’s books, anthologies. He became a curator and popularizer of Black culture rather than its most awake, most enlightened, most emotive, and most dangerous-to-empire living voice. The suppression didn’t kill him. It effectively lobotomized him or silenced him and progressive culture. It redirected him into safer-for-empire channels, which is in many ways more useful to hegemonic suppression than outright martyrdom. A totally silenced Hughes would have been a cause. A partially muted, domesticated Hughes was a managed problem.

“Goodbye Christ” was written in 1932, weaponized in 1940, re-weaponized continuously through the 1940s, and then definitively in 1953. That twenty-year arc shows the suppression operating not through a single dramatic act of censorship but through sustained, patient, opportunistic use of a single exhibit. The American literary culture, the establishment, is gutless and cowardly, offensive, retrograde, and ideologically aggressive and always has been — New Critics and other formalist theorists all included. The poem didn’t wholly ruin Hughes, it “disciplined” him under the permanent threat of ruination that kept him and other individuals — and the culture, society, and institutions — self-censoring and outwardly brainwashing to this very day. That’s the subtler and more insidious operation, in many ways more powerful, sweeping, and effective than outright banning. You falsely shape things, whole canons, the range of permissible thought. You internalize and institutionalize false consciousness and false reality, and you kill imagination and possibility, by blocks and bans but often even more destructively by managed diminishment, the fake made fundamental and permanent, supposedly universal in aesthetics and norms.

Just so has literary culture been systematically corrupted and ruined, disinformed and lobotomized, and made taboo, writ large. You force people to write within severe limits made invisible, by eviscerating reality and possibility, thinkability and permissibility. The political climate pushed Hughes to retreat from the explicit and powerful honesty and insight, called radicalism, of his most politically serious work toward a more soothing and more cautious approach that the establishment could celebrate without being threatened by.

The Hughes who died in 1967 was celebrated but the celebration was for a partial version of his achievement, the folk warmth and the racial pride and the vernacular beauty, not the revolutionary internationalism, not the explicit anti-capitalism, not the “Goodbye Christ” position and understanding. The most intellectually and politically and psychologically serious work was either forgotten or remembered as a youthful excess that he wisely moved beyond. Hughes’ McCarthy testimony saved himself from being silenced but reshaped what the culture would hear from him and remember.

In some ways this political softening may be foreshadowed in Hughes’ heart-expanding novel Not Without Laughter, which may be the most reassuring and warm novel of the Big Bang of American literature, the most quietly radical of the six repressed novels. Sandy, a black boy, grows up in a small Kansas town, his family around him, the textures of that life drawn with impressive love and evocation across a range of what is called ordinary life: music and church, hard labor and much laughter, financial troubles, family grief and the raw experience and weight of being Black in America, with no strict focus on any one thing. The feeling is of a panoramic family you want to know and are sad to leave.

Not Without Laughter is probably the least formally unusual of the nine novels of the Big Bang, an easy-going inviting achievement. Hughes follows the lives and world, letting content shape form, and does not reach for special effects. The novel makes what is called common life fully literary, giving it complete and unhurried attention, little or nothing formally programmatic or pointedly discursive, little or nothing overtly ideological. Rather the novel shares one of the commonalities of the Big Bang novels in being unusually diverse and liberatory and jammed full of immediate and vital, dynamic and populist life.

Investigated by Congress and surveilled by the FBI for decades, a committed “radical” writer, anti-empire and revolutionary, Langston Hughes does not write a tract in Not Without Laughter that sets out to argue that Black working-class life in Kansas is important. He shows it through warm and specific drama: the strength and fraught racial and theological diplomacy of Sandy’s grandmother “Aunt” Hager, and his Aunt Tempy with her desperate push for respectability in white society, and his Aunt Harriett rejecting respectability to sing the blues, and his mother Annjee, who leaves Sandy, lost to her love for his wandering father Jimboy. Sandy moves between their worlds trying to understand what kind of Black man he might become and how he might get a full education.

There is no explicit thesis about Black life but a drama of human consciousness and expression, drawn with the kind of attention that is a moral and political act. In a literary culture that typically made Black working-class life invisible, exotic, or sociological, Hughes made this life far more human, a quiet revolution. The novel was initially honored then expelled from the canon. It’s a work as accomplished and important as, and in many ways far more so than, A Farewell to Arms, Look Homeward, Angel, and The Sound and the Fury, the entitled trio of the same extraordinary season, all three canonized, unlike Not Without Laughter, which was dismissed and forgotten.

The Opening of Not Without Laughter:

Aunt Hager Williams stood in her doorway and looked out at the sun. The western sky was a sulphurous yellow and the sun a red ball dropping slowly behind the trees and house-tops. Its setting left the rest of the heavens grey with clouds.

“Huh! A storm’s comin’,” said Aunt Hager aloud.

A pullet ran across the back yard and into a square-cut hole in an unpainted piano-box which served as the roosting-house. An old hen clucked her brood together and, with the tiny chicks, went into a small box beside the large one. The air was very still. Not a leaf stirred on the green apple-tree. Not a single closed flower of the morning-glories trembled on the back fence. The air was very still and yellow. Something sultry and oppressive made a small boy in the doorway stand closer to his grandmother, clutching her apron with his brown hands.

Perhaps it’s worth noting here that what the surveillance and harassment and compelled testimony and travel restrictions, the arrests and imprisonments, suppression and literary, artistic, and intellectual assassinations of Langton Hughes, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, Tillie Olsen, Meridel Le Sueur, Agnes Smedley and many others constitutes in aggregate is a systematic state-capitalist campaign of conquest against populist consciousness and rights, against the Black, female, working class, and the diverse socialist literary and cultural traditions that went far beyond the Hollywood blacklist that receives most of the historical attention — including the ideological state-capitalist imposition of New Criticism, followed by the ideological state-capitalist imposition of accommodationist “cultural Marxism” and French and European “Theory,” and the other establishment accommodationist sellout formalist theories like postmodernism and metamodernism and the like, the establishment narcissism of most literary memoir and so-called autofiction. Ever lobotomized, thoroughly brainwashed, the literary establishment blathers on about all this formalist nothingness still today, as if it were somehow meaningful — rather than deeply irrelevant to a world it lacks the consciousness and courage to fully face. It’s like playing tiddlywinks on the Titanic. Establishment culture is groomed for it.

The Hollywood blacklist is the most famous example of cultural repression because it involved prominent names in a prominent industry and dramatic confrontations that the mainstream culture cared about. But the less dramatic and less visible persecution and lobotomization of writers and intellectuals — the surveillance files, the passport seizures, the compelled testimonies, the destroyed careers, the enforced ideologies, the books driven out of print — constituted an even more severe and complete assault on American literature and culture, society and politics. It targeted not just individual careers but the entire intellectual and artistic mentality, and the whole infrastructure of radical or merely progressive populist cultural production, of diverse and liberatory ideologies — the publishers, the magazines, the organizations, the networks through which writers, teachers, students, community members found each other and sustained each other, communicated, produced, and organized. The assault didn’t just silence individual voices — it dismantled the institutional conditions that made those voices possible and replaced them with an enforced literary culture of privatized consciousness and managed aesthetics that has functioned as cultural brainwashing from the Cold War to the present, quashing the most liberatory and fully conscious art and intellect wherever it has appeared.

That’s why the recovery has been so slow and so incomplete. It’s difficult to simply republish the books and implement courses and create organizations without also rebuilding the critical vocabulary and institutional power understanding by understanding, lost piece of history by smashed piece of history. You need to create a receptive and active public, culture, and the institutional infrastructure that gives meaning and reach. The ecosystem destruction of an enlightened populace is the deepest and most lasting damage of the ongoing assault by the establishment in both its liberal and right wings, and so it is still being repaired and contested, to this day.1

A deceitful establishment becomes a stupid establishment, which is dangerous, destructive, and galling in every realm. A confused and ignorant, weak and deluded public can be coerced. Organized religion set the template for this. If hundreds of millions of people can be brought to believe in flattering and threatening human-like fake Gods in the sky by stories and myths endlessly repeated and imposed by authority figures, then people can be brought to believe anything, unless there is purposeful, organized, conscious resistance and liberatory resources. The big lie can prevail by sheer brainwashing, even without the need for state-capitalist guns to drive the point home. Pax Americana — peace at the end of a gun. Canon Americana — white empire literature as the end of establishment publishing. The state capitalist military has plenty of guns and brainwashing techniques for its soldiers, and so do the culture industries have many powerful tools and seductions, many myths and taboos to control and “mentally cleanse” the literati and the institutionalized and general public.2

Just as the towering literary writers Agnes Smedley, Michael Gold, and Langston Hughes and their great novels were gutted from literary history, so to was Jamaican-American Claude McKay and his tour de force novel Banjo, along with his first novel Home to Harlem. Banjo is set in Marseille, France, on the Mediterranean waterfront among Black sailors and drifters from across the African diaspora. It may be the first pan-African novel and the greatest, bringing together Caribbean, American, and African Black consciousnesses in a single space, exploring what they share and where they diverge, and explicitly considering what might be hoped for. The political and philosophical and cultural probing is inseparable from the dramatic narrative.

The intellectual protagonist Ray explores Du Bois’s understanding of double consciousness in an international frame: white capitalist society sees Black people one way, while Black people experience life behind the veil of racial and racist misperception and misrepresentation. McKay does something no American novelist had done before, dramatizing the Black world from the perspective of the global African diaspora and showing the common economic and racial issues that structured all their lives differently, while in other ways treating them similarly.

McKay was born to mixed conditions in Jamaica, his family somewhat more prosperous than most, though still subject to British colonial rule and oppression. He lived a kind of working class and bohemian poverty as an adult, working service and factory jobs, later as editor and journalist, and traveling widely while writing as a socialist and black liberationist. Banjo has the quality of a person who has chosen to see and experience what he might have avoided but immersed himself fully, which is its own kind of testimony — in this case highly empathetic and imaginative, perceptive and revolutionary.

McKay’s politics were liberatory, independent, and irreducible to any single party line, which made him simultaneously one of the most important political intellectuals of the African diaspora and one of the most institutionally homeless. He was a committed socialist from his Jamaica years, radicalized further by American racism, aligned with but never fully a part of the Communist Party. His basic political position was that racial oppression could not be dissolved or disappeared into class analysis, that Black liberation had its own logic and its own timeline that the Communist Party’s framework consistently subordinated to other priorities. The Communist Party continuously overemphasized “worker” and underemphasized “people” — as if people have diminished rights or agency if they are, for whatever reason, not “workers,” or not primarily workers. That insistence made McKay too radical — too working class for the NAACP and too insistent on racial specificity for the Communist Party’s class universalism, too sexually free and too bohemian for the respectable strands of the Harlem Renaissance, and too Black and too radical for the white literary establishment. He occupied the intersection of pan-African internationalism, “proletarian” or working class socialism, and sexual liberation in ways that no institutional home of his period could fully accommodate.

Claude McKay’s literary achievement is far larger and more various than any canonical account acknowledges, an account from which he is not entirely excluded, probably thanks mainly to one Red Summer poem that went viral for its time, and then all time, during the First Red Scare — “If We Must Die.”

If we must die—let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die—oh, let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

Oh, kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered, let us still be brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but—fighting back!

Another of McKay’s great Red Summer poems:

Your door is shut against my tightened face,
And I am sharp as steel with discontent;
But I possess the courage and the grace
To bear my anger proudly and unbent.
The pavement slabs burn loose beneath my feet,
And passion rends my vitals as I pass,
A chafing savage, down the decent street;
Where boldly shines your shuttered door of glass.
Oh I must search for wisdom every hour,
Deep in my wrathful bosom sore and raw,
And find in it the superhuman power
To hold me to the letter of your law!
Oh I must keep my heart inviolate,
Against the poison of your deadly hate!

McKay was part of the Harlem Renaissance, though on its edges. He published many poems in the socialist magazine The Liberator which he co-edited at times, including “If We Must Die” and “The White House” both written immediately in response to the corporate-state oppression of the First Red Scare and the race riots of 1919 — Red Summer. “If We Must Die” became one of the most widely circulated poems in the language. His novels Home to Harlem and Banjo, the former a best-seller, brought working-class Black life into the literary conversation of the Harlem Renaissance. His working class focus and his explicit sexuality and his pan-African internationalism made him and his bountiful work harder to incorporate into the Harlem Renaissance and therefore into a slice of the establishment canon than the prodigious literary efforts of Langston Hughes or even the brief literary moment of Nella Larsen.

Banjo is arguably his supreme achievement and one of the most underread important novels in American literary history. The Marseille waterfront as the site of pan-African consciousness, the African diaspora thinking about itself across national and cultural differences, the working class Black consciousness, life, and world as the ground of political and philosophical reflection does something no American novel had remotely done before and very few have done since. The novel is simultaneously a work of first-rate literary craft and a work of political and philosophical theory, showing an organic intellectual and artist, an organic intellect and art at their most lively and profound.

Home to Harlem — his first novel, the commercial success that gave him a platform — is rawer and more visceral than Banjo, the Harlem working class portrayed with a sensory directness and a sexual frankness that scandalized W.E.B. Du Bois while giving it an energy and an authenticity that the more respectable Harlem Renaissance writing avoided. His autobiography A Long Way from Home (1937) is one of the great political autobiographies of the century, the pan-African internationalist intellectual revealing his own creation and his own trajectory with honesty and analytical clarity, the personal and the political bound together in the way that characterizes all his best work. To go with McKay’s three novels published between 1928 and 1933 — not to mention his collection of short stories, Gingertown, published 1932 — there’s also the little matter of Claude McKay’s three great posthumous novels published about five, eight, and nine decades after being written: Harlem Glory (written 1938–1940, published 1990), Amiable With Big Teeth (written 1941, published 2017), and Romance in Marseille (written 1933, published 2020).

Given these novels and stories and autobiography, let alone his poetry and essays and so on, Jamaican-American Claude McKay should be understood as the preeminent, leading novelist and literary writer of the late socialist era in America, and in the first half of the twentieth century, not Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner or anyone else. And half of his novels he couldn’t even get published within an average of 60 years after the end of his life:

• Home to Harlem (1928)

• Banjo (1929)

• Gingertown (1932) [stories]

• Banana Bottom (1933)

• Romance in Marseille (1933/2020)

• Harlem Glory (1940/1990)

• Amiable With Big Teeth (1941/2017)

Claude McKay is, to say the least, a major literary novelist, and literary writer in general, whose full achievement, the poetry, the novels, the stories, the memoirs, the essays, and other work, makes up one of the most significant bodies of work produced by any writer not only in the Harlem Renaissance era but in all of American history. His major contributions are far more historically and literarily important and more formally achieved than his slight admission into the establishment canon acknowledges at all: his focus on a pan-African internationalist consciousness, a working class Black consciousness as both literary and political, and the emphasis on race alongside a broader socialist framework. McKay’s exclusion is not an oversight or a matter of taste. His exclusion is hegemonic suppression by design. Also on instinct as if by design. It’s state-capitalist prejudice and bias. It’s the destructive work of empire.

The American literary canon has been unjust to excluded writers, and it has actively crippled American literature itself. The canon’s gatekeepers harmed McKay, Hughes, Larsen, Smedley, Gold, Thurman, McNickle, Tsiang, and many others, and they impoverished every subsequent American writer who was handed a diminished and distorted map of what American literature was and could do. American literature has been stunted because its practitioners were trained on a fake canon that excised its most conscious and most experiential voices, its most penetrating and comprehensive understanding of people and society. The canon did not protect American literature from inferior writers. It protected American literature from itself, from its own most fully human capacities, which are liberatory, left, socialist, anti-capitalist, anti-empire, and therefore relentlessly assailed.

That’s the reality. Fully human, greatly accomplished literature poses a basic threat to empire and to the establishment organizations and institutions that serve it, to establishment psychologies, beliefs, mindsets, to its art and literature, its consciousness and conscience. That’s what makes the fake canon of the violent plutocrat establishment hegemonic rather than merely exclusionary. Hegemony naturalizes the suppression until the diminished version feels complete or superior, and people eventually consent or succumb unwittingly to their own conquest while thinking they are full and free in thought and action. And so they help perpetuate the suffocated and lobotomized state of affairs, all the while thinking they are being full and brilliant and thoughtful, clear-eyed and open-minded, even liberatory.

Meanwhile the actual liberatory literature at its most expansive, the best of any real and authentic canon, functions against hegemony and conquest, and is far more real and true to life, far more perceptive and full of life, with far greater literary effect and potential, scope and depth, not least the works of Claude McKay.

The opening of Banjo:

Heaving along from side to side, like a sailor on the unsteady deck of a ship, Lincoln Agrippa Daily, familiarly known as Banjo, patrolled the magnificent length of the great breakwater of Marseilles, a banjo in his hand.

“It sure is some moh mahvelous job,” he noted mentally; “most wonderful bank in the ocean I evah did see.”

It was afternoon. Banjo had walked the long distance of the breakwater and was returning to the Joliette end. He wore a cheap pair of slippers, suitable to the climate, a kind much used by the very poor of Provence. They were an ugly drab-brown color, which, however, was mitigated by the crimson socks and the yellow scarf with its elaborate pattern of black, yellow, and red at both ends, that was knotted around his neck and hung down the front of his blue-jean shirt.

Suddenly he stood still in his tracks as out of the bottom of one of the many freight cars along the quay he saw black bodies dropping. Banjo knew box cars. He had hoboed in America. But never had he come across a box car with a hole in the bottom. Had those black boys made it? He went down on the quay to see.

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Meanwhile, extensive footnotes have been restored to Part One and Part Two that got dropped when I copied each part out of the whole to post separately. Telling biographical sketches of the Big Bang novelists have now been restored to Part One at footnote, and historical context of a dozen-plus novelists has been restored to Part Two, along with a footnote on Hemingway’s politicized denial of the Pulitzer Prize for For Whom the Bell Tolls, and a couple other footnotes on suppressed novelists.

Itzok Isaac “Irwin” Granich gave himself the pen name of a Jewish abolitionist, Michael Gold, with a gentile name to avoid discrimination in his literary writing.

Gold was beaten into radical movements at the receiving end of police repression and starvation. After being beaten bloody at an unemployment protest, he began writing — submitting poems and articles to the socialist magazine The Masses, and writing plays with the Provincetown Players, a collective of artists that included Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell.

Gold became one of the most famous writers of the 1930s, helping to spark a movement of proletarian culture across the United States that’s gone unparalleled since. His 1930 book, Jews Without Money, was reprinted twenty-five times by 1950, translated into sixteen languages, and spread underground throughout Nazi Germany to combat antisemitic propaganda.

Jews Without Money is drawn directly from Gold’s own childhood — a visceral, communal series of animated sketches of Lower East Side Manhattan immigrant poverty, brutal in their honesty and invigorating in their vitality. The pain is open, the politics are inseparable from the personal, and the raw world Gold grew up in is shown without false sentiment or evasion from any uncomfortable truths.

Sinclair Lewis praised Gold in his [1930] Nobel Prize acceptance speech [“The American Fear of Literature”] as one of the few young writers leading American literature out from “the stuffiness of safe, sane, and incredibly dull provincialism.”

By way of a parallel though different vein of progressive populist fiction like Victor Hugo’s1 The Last Day of a Condemned Man, published a century before, Gold dramatizes a single crushing condition from the inside — but collectively rather than individually, the community as the consciousness rather than any solitary mind. In this way it differs fundamentally from Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth, which is equally autobiographical and equally rooted in lived experience but whose consciousness is shown inside-out rather than outside-in — one woman’s mind manifesting the world, the collective shown through the singular rather than the singular dissolved into the collective. Together the two novels represent two great modes of left liberatory autobiographical fiction — the communal and the individual — each achieving at the highest level a kind of a print film of consciousness in and of the world.

The rough and struggling and lively streets of the Jewish immigrant quarter are not backdrop but protagonist. The tenements and pushcarts and sweatshops and street corners generate a collective life that is simultaneously beautiful and harsh, written by someone made of this material rather than an observer from outside — Gold an organic intellectual like Smedley, also counter hegemonic. Gold was born to the poverty he describes. He shows the collective life of the immigrant poor with the full weight and attention that literature too often reserves for the solitary self, to the exclusion of the community at large. That said, both Daughter of Earth and Jews Without Money weave seamlessly back and forth between the state of the community, and society, and individuals both in particular and in general.

The somewhat abrupt revolutionary ending of the novel can strike even sympathetic readers as bolted-on, and it’s disappointing that the quick striking revolutionary sentiment and insight at the end is not explicitly fleshed out throughout the novel. Nevertheless, the organic emotional truth of the story is moving and insightful, instructive and humanizing. The besieged community is shown along a broad and powerful spectrum of love and much grief prompting the revolutionary insight and resolution that is called for at the end.

Mike Gold was an organic intellectual in the Gramscian2 sense, the most explicit and unwavering communist literary figure in America — a Communist Party member from the early 1920s until his death in 1967, editor of the New Masses at the peak of its influence, the man who did as much as anyone to define and sustain the proletarian and left literary movement. Both “Michael Gold,” a Jewish radical from Manhattan, and “V. F. Calverton” (George Goetz), a Jewish radical from Baltimore, editor of The Modern Quarterly and many books of left criticism, published under gentile names to get their work taken seriously, no small detail of literary suppression.

Jews without Money was an immediate success, going through eleven reprints in the first year. It was translated into over a dozen languages. By 1950, it had been reprinted 25 times.

While Calverton was more politically independent and died early, Mike Gold never recanted, never retreated, never made public accommodations of the kind Langston Hughes was forced into during the Second Red Scare McCarthy hearings and that other former radicals made voluntarily as the Cold War battered, poisoned, and warped political, social, and literary culture. The price was total and sustained for Gold. Jews Without Money was suppressed during the Second Red Scare, as Gold’s critical framework was declared aesthetically bankrupt by the establishmentarian New Critics whose anti-social vocabulary was partly constructed as a direct response to Gold’s insistence that literature served class interests. Then the European cultural “Western” Marxists and Theorists wholly ignored Gold and the American “Old” Left as they sought and found accommodation with state-capitalist institutions.

Gold’s platform shrank from the New Masses to the Daily Worker, and the man who had been at the heart of American literary culture in 1930 was writing for an audience of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands by 1960. What was done to Mike Gold was not imprisonment but something in some ways more killing: the destruction of the critical vocabulary that would make sense of the best and most valuable of American literature. Given the New Critics formalist mentality, even when knowledgeable literary voices spoke they could no longer be understood as saying anything serious or creditable. America and its literature were lobotomized and institutionalized. A false canon was inflated into place in service of the bigoted capitalist empire and its plutocracy. American culture was forcibly badly corrupted to the root.

Taylor Dorrell’s excellent 2022 article in Jacobin, “Mike Gold Was a Working-Class Hero,” is worth quoting at length:

When Gold and his family came back from briefly living in France in 1950, the impact of the blacklist, loyalty oaths, and arrests of Communist Party leaders had completely transformed the atmosphere of the country. All of a sudden, children at school wouldn’t talk to Gold’s kids about his columns, writers and artists feared arrest, and tens of millions of citizens at every level were spied on by the FBI, while many labor and Party organizers were rounded up and imprisoned (which, due to prison conditions, could amount to a death sentence). “It is obviously dangerous to think,” Gold reflected of the McCarthy era. It was the peak of repressive terror, but only the beginning of a historical purge.

Due to the tyranny of this period, Gold remained unemployed for much of the rest of his life. That he was once considered a major literary figure was erased by anti-communist fear and suppression. The once famous proletarian writer, at one point compared to Walt Whitman, had been purged from literary history. Over the decades, attempts at writing biographies and dissertations about Gold have been blocked by academia and publishers, while his legacy has continued to be slandered. Prominent anti-communist academics have labelled him as a “megalomaniac,” a sectarian “literary czar,” and a “not very bright [. . .] political propagandist in dreamland.” His legacy was not simply erased, but reconstructed. The name “Mike Gold,” if it were to be mentioned at all, had to be synonymous with all of the evils that were stapled to the word “Communist.”

Mike Gold died the same year as Langston Hughes, 1967, eight days apart, his major work still maligned and drowned, the tradition he had done most to create still trashed by the critical and canonical disinformation and myths that the socio-political and cultural Hot and Cold Wars continue to pile on top of it.

The opening of Jews Without Money:

I can never forget the East Side where I lived as a boy.

It was a block from the notorious Bowery, a tenement canyon hung with fire-escapes, bed-clothing, and faces.

Always these faces at the tenement windows. The street that never failed them. It was an immense excitement. It never slept. It roared like a sea. It exploded like fireworks.

People pushed and wrangled in the street. There were armies of howling pushcart peddlers. Women screamed, dogs barked and copulated. Babies cried.

A parrot cursed. Ragged kids played under the truck-horses. Fat housewives fought from stoop to stoop. A beggar sang.

At the livery stable coach drivers lounged on a bench. They hee-hawed with laughter, they guzzled cans of beer.

Pimps, gamblers and red-nosed bums; peanut politicians, pugilists in sweaters; tinhorn sports and tall longshoremen in overalls. An endless pageant of East Side life passed through the wicker doors of Jake Wolf’s saloon.

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Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth is the most brilliant and expansive novel in the Big Bang and arguably in American history — one woman’s consciousness with the whole world moving through it, the personal and the political not merely connected but inseparable, two currents of the same river. Set during youth and young adulthood before and after World War One, the protagonist Marie Rogers — largely written as barely disguised autobiography — is born into desperate rural poverty in Missouri farm country. Her family moves for work to a Colorado mining camp where grinding poverty continues. The novel follows Marie, family, friends, and allies through crushing economic times and through all kinds of oppression, suffering, and class conflict, through labor organizing, feminist awakening, stop-and-start education, imprisonment and torture, exile, and deep involvement in the Indian independence movement and the international revolutionary left.

The first half of the novel follows Marie Rogers surviving rural America and increasingly understanding it. The second half moves from her teaching with an eighth-grade education in New Mexico through a brief marriage in California, then continuing her education in New York City, where she becomes involved in the antiwar movement and the Indian national decolonization struggle. Agnes Smedley was one-eighth Cherokee through her father’s grandmother, and most of the novel dramatizes thoroughly dispossessed working class consciousness and survival through politicization, from local and national to international struggle and activity.

To call the novel Tolstoyan in ambition, sweep, and depth is not hyperbole as the establishment canon-arbiters might think. It’s simply accurate. The scope is enormous, the human exploration profound, and at times almost unbearably intense. What makes the novel phenomenal is its epic range and seemingly all-seeing insight and its organic unity. It is Victorian in emotional directness, transparency, and intelligence, modern in psychological self-awareness, proletarian in working class and dispossessed roots and material conditions, socialist in politics, internationalist in vision, antiwar in conviction, feminist and wholly humanitarian in consciousness, revolutionary, earthy in sensory grounding, and race-class-gender incisive in analysis. The novel is all of this and more simultaneously, in a single voice, without strain or fancy turns, because Smedley herself was all of these things, putting herself together, pulling herself through oppression — by enormous grit and outrage, love and will.

The emotional transparency, the Native and working-class knowledge, the revolutionary political analysis, the feminist rage, the class consciousness, the endless insight and the endless love — in Daughter of Earth these all work together in an ambitious novel that is wholly aware. All her political and psychological multitudes are expressions of one unified consciousness, inseparable, because Smedley through Marie Rogers always understood consciousness as something far larger than the self — a living entity she always wanted more of, always in action. Her self small in a vast world. She never let that smallness back down from the vastness, and she never let the vast world go unexplored or dwarf her. As a result her consciousness grew immense. It grew to be the size of the world.

Agnes Smedley expresses one seemingly all-containing unified consciousness shaped by one specific life lived at a maximum intersection of everything history was doing to people like her, and everything that she could do within those domestic and local, national and international crosshairs. The novel is incandescent and brutal. It does more things well and at greater depth than any other American novel, and possibly any novel in any language, excepting maybe in a different way a work as gigantic as Les Misérables, which is so phenomenally massive that it all but overwhelms any comparison. Even that comparison is apt, because Hugo also achieves a counterintuitive and somewhat comparable unification of the personal and the historical and the political and the philosophical and the emotional at great sweep.

As a young adult Marie is kidnapped by the state and imprisoned for her role in supposedly revolutionary activity in New York, participating in Indian national decolonization efforts:

The Tombs jail – called so by some man of grim humor. And the name has clung. Its sullen gray walls loom within ten minutes of Wall Street. It is the shadow of Wall Street, for it is the detaining place for those who are poor and commit crimes because they are poor. It is sullen and cynical. Savage. A monument of the savagery within man. Men and women pass into it – slouching, defeated, debased. Inside, the odor of carbolic acid penetrates everything and a gray twilight clings like fog to everything. Inside the women’s prison is a cell-block, three stories high, surrounded by a wide corridor, and this corridor by a blank stone wall rearing upward. At the top of the wall is a row of little windows. In this jail women sit for weeks or months awaiting the trial that condemns them to servitude in one or another prison of the State, or to the freedom that sends them back into a world that is as pitiless as the prison. As they wait, some weep; some sit for hours in that dull, hopeless misery compared with which death would be a relief; some wait in sickening fear; some in sneaking bravado. I was one of the endless stream that passed in and out of the Tombs gates. It is good that I did. It is good that we should each know how others suffer; and if we have already known, that we should not forget; that we be forced to the level of the most miserable of men before we judge, and that we experience in our hearts again and again the suffering of the dispossessed.

In scope and intensity, in lived experience and idea, in the drama of a single human life carrying the weight of an entire world’s struggle, Daughter of Earth can seem to dwarf the story of all but the greatest novels ever written. It is in many ways unsurpassed, as great an American novel as any, and far more so than The Great Gatsby, which is typically lauded as the great American novel. See: “The Great Gatsby and Imperial Culture”. Imagine if Gatsby as the great American school novel were replaced by Daughter of Earth, or by any part of it for those who fear length. Imagine if the entire entitled propertied novels of the American canon were replaced by a mix of the great suppressed dispossessed novels, of even a single moment in time: Home to Harlem and Banjo by Claude McKay, Quicksand and Passing by Nella Larsen, Plum Bun by Jessie Fauset, The Blacker the Berry by Wallace Thurman, Jews Without Money by Michael Gold, Not Without Laughter by Langston Hughes, The Surrounded by D’Arcy McNickle, or The Hanging on Union Square by H.T. Tsiang. Imagine if the entitled propertied consciousnesses and views of the American canon were replaced by overt anti-imperial, antiwar, and liberatory socialist novels — that is, novels of full human consciousness. That would be healthy and sane, the sign of a non-imperial, non-bigoted, non-plutocratic culture. And it’s necessary, at this point, if the world is to have a decent chance to survive.

In Daughter of Earth, Marie’s life as a child with her parents and siblings dramatizes an American epic of the dispossessed long before she becomes a political revolutionary:

My father and mother were quarreling. Such a quarrel it was that it struck terror into my heart. My father cursed and my mother wept. It was the beginning of many terrible quarrels that blackened my child life.

My father wanted to make money, he said – a lot of money – and he could make it now if we went away somewhere. He wanted to break away from the farm with its endless pettiness. Our life there had indeed been poor, but as I see it now, it had been healthy and securely rooted in the soil. My mother was satisfied to work ceaselessly and to save a few pennies a year, but for my father such an existence was death, and he had stood it as long as he could. There were but three or four festivals a year. The rest of the time he had to follow the lone plow over badly yielding, stony soil, stumbling over the clods with his bare feet. He wanted to wear shoes all the year, but my mother thought if she could carry two buckets of water at a time from the well a mile away – and in her bare feet; if she could, as she put it, “work like a dog,” he had nothing to complain of. No, he replied, he wasn’t a Garfield, like her folks – satisfied, stingy like the whole family! He was a Rogers! Yes, indeed, he was a Rogers, my mother replied – he was a Rogers every bit of him, and all that her father had said against him was true – he was never able to stick to anything more than a year! Always wanting to change, always complaining, always telling stories that weren’t true and singing songs instead of working; and thinking hard-working people couldn’t see through him!

That touched my father to the quick. He said he’d leave her and never come back. “Come here, Marie!” he commanded, and then, “Come here, George!”

He was going to take George and me with him!

My mother sank into a kitchen chair and began to weep. My father ordered me to come to him again, telling my mother that she treated George and me as if we were dogs! But there was something about my mother that made me disobey the father that night. I ran to my mother and placed my hand on her knee and her tears fell on it.

My father did not go away, and I thought it was because I would not go with him. But he won at last, for we all went away. And from that moment our roots were torn from the soil and we began a life of wandering, searching for success and happiness and riches that always lay just beyond – where we were not. Only since then I have heard the old saying: “Where I am not, there is happiness.”

It can fairly be said that Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth is the broadest and deepest and most aesthetically and normatively accomplished novel in American literary history, and one of the greatest novels in any language. Prominent literary critic and scholar Harold Bloom compared Emily Dickinson to William Shakespeare. Dickinson is indeed dazzling, and it makes as much sense or more to compare Agnes Smedley to Victor Hugo — especially the Hugo of Les Misérables — though Smedley is finally in a category of her own: a novelist of the dispossessed from inside the dispossession rather than a novelist about the dispossessed from a position of relative privilege.

Great American novelist Herman Melville is vast but not unified or rooted in dispossessed consciousness. John Dos Passos is formally radical and socially illuminating but the human warmth is thin. William Faulkner is formally complex but politically limited and socially narrow. Ernest Hemingway is exactingly controlled, too much so, confined to a small emotional and social range. F. Scott Fitzgerald was fixated on the entitled class and its partial self-destructiveness. John Steinbeck is socially engaged but predominantly observational rather than organic. His novels view the dispossessed with sympathy and sometimes solidarity from outside rather than dramatized from inside, the labor consciousness of In Dubious Battle and the Joad chapters of The Grapes of Wrath approaching but not fully achieving the organic position that Gold and Smedley and McKay never had to approach because they never left it. Agnes Smedley’s range in Daughter of Earth is wider than any of them, deeper, as complex and more so, unified and far more rooted in the lived drama and expansive consciousness of the dispossessed — heart, mind, and guts inseparable from the world that formed and tried to destroy them.

Hugo in Les Misérables may be the only writer who achieves comparable unification of the personal and the historical and the political and the philosophical and the emotional at comparable scale. Hugo had the advantage of being a prominent male author who wrote in a situation that celebrated this kind of ambition. He was published by major houses, reviewed seriously, translated immediately. He was highly awarded, extensively published, and famous for decades in advance of Les Misérables. Daughter of Earth, a novel not only about the dispossessed but by the dispossessed, could easily be ignored, whereas Les Misérables a novel about the dispossessed but by an elite and propertied author could be resisted and smeared by the establishment, as it was, but could not be ignored or entirely buried, as was Daughter of Earth.

Many of the great novelists — Hugo, Defoe, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy — were journalists, prison visitors, students of criminal and institutional life, as Mary McCarthy noted in On the Contrary (1961). The experience of Agnes Smedley was that she did not merely visit prison. She was kidnapped into it — seized without due process, isolated, and life-threateningly tortured, in what would look today like an ICE detention under Trumpian terror. That Daughter of Earth exists at all is incredible. That it achieves what it achieves is almost miraculous. It could not be more fundamental to reality and possibility both. It could not be more illuminating of the human consciousness that ought to be, needs to be pervasive today.

And so Daughter of Earth deserves to be read alongside Les Misérables as one of the supreme and core achievements of the novel form, not least in its home country, America. The novel, the consciousness, the perspective of society is boldly intellectual and emotional, profoundly political and psychological, a gripping read by a gripping writer, mind-blowing at times and heart-wrenching, far ahead of its time and wholly of it. The fact that it is not recognized as such is one of the great scandals of literary history. Victor Hugo was a man of the establishment writing of and for the masses, counter hegemonic. Agnes Smedley was one of the masses writing of, for, and from within the people — also counter hegemonic, the difference between a Gramscian traditional intellectual and an organic intellectual, as we will explore. Agnes Smedley was her own misérable, exploring and dramatizing her consciousness and her world with the mastery of the greatest novelists. It is fitting then that among the leading socialist cultural journals she wrote for was the New Masses — edited by Michael Gold, whose own novel Jews Without Money sits alongside hers in the thirteen months of the Big Bang.

In 1918 when she was twenty-six, Agnes Smedley was seized without due process, arrested by the U.S. Naval Intelligence Bureau, and tortured and held in prison for two months and indicted for violations of the Espionage Act. A decade later she wrote Daughter of Earth, producing one of the supreme achievements of the American novel under conditions that make its existence almost miraculous. Writing the novel was part of her attempt to avoid killing herself, half destroyed by America as she was. Then in the 1930s and 1940s she became a great international war correspondent and author of multiple books on politics, decolonization, and revolution. Also like Ernest Hemingway, Agnes Smedley was involved in intelligence operations, including with the Soviet Union. And yet while Smedley wrote what has every right to be considered the preeminent American novel that artfully conflates events that happened on separate continents almost entirely into North America, and while Hemingway won the Nobel Prize, Smedley is unknown, despite having written the greater novel, or the greatest.

Excerpts of Agnes Smedley’s Wikipedia entry read like a novel unto themselves:

Raised in a poverty-stricken miner’s family in Missouri and Colorado, she dramatized the formation of her feminist and socialist consciousness in the autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth.

In China, Smedley served as a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Manchester Guardian.

In Xi’an during the Xi’an Incident of December 1936, she was awakened by soldiers and recruited to broadcast the news in English via radio. Smedley’s broadcasts assured foreign powers that that Chiang Kai-shek was safe, and that the incident was not a coup but rather an attempt to unite the country.

In 1937 she applied for membership in the Chinese Communist Party but was rejected due to Party reservations about her lack of discipline and what it viewed as her excessive independence of mind. Smedley was devastated by this rejection but remained passionately devoted to the Chinese communist cause.

Smedley had a sexual relationship with Richard Sorge, a Soviet spymaster, while in Shanghai, and probably with Ozaki Hotsumi, a correspondent for the Asahi Shimbun. … Maj. Gen. Charles A. Willoughby, who served with Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s chief of intelligence, claimed that Smedley was a member of the anti-Japanese Sorge spy ring. After the war, Smedley threatened to sue Willoughby for making the accusation.

She relocated to Washington, DC in 1941 to advocate for China and authored several works on China’s revolution. In the mid 1940s she was an influential voice in support of the Chinese Communists on public forums and NBC radio. Her 1944 book Battle Hymn of China was widely read and reviewed. During the 1940s she lived at Yaddo, a writer’s colony in upstate New York and lived at times with Edgar Snow. In 1947 she was accused of espionage by General Douglas MacArthur and followed by the FBI. Feeling pressure, she left the U.S. in the autumn of 1949. She died in the UK in 1950 after surgery for an ulcer.

What additional culturally impactful novels might Agnes Smedley have written in the decades or her life that she never saw? And what are the odds that she could have gotten sufficient support, encouragement, or any opening from the publishing establishment that would help her do so? Not especially great. This is how literature and culture, consciousness and country are gutted. This is how a country is torn apart, it’s mind and understanding and emotions savaged. The voices that most need to be heard, that have seen and understand the most, are silenced, by a seemingly infinite number of mechanisms. Thus culture is made phony and stupid, callous and brutal, and becomes deeply antisocial and culturally illiterate. And such an established culture calls itself enlightened and respectable and literary. It has no idea what it is talking about. It doesn’t know that it doesn’t know. Its consciousness and perspective have been gutted. It has gutted itself. Such an establishment holds self-congratulatory parties of the brainwashed and gives itself racist and classist awards and considers itself civilized — the most civilized. It is a culture of elegant and refined barbarians who don’t comprehend themselves or their society from a hole in the ground, though they think they do. They are nice enough people, dumbed down and dumbing, destructive, while counting themselves smart and beneficial to the world. This is the entitled propertied establishment that Agnes Smedley and her anti-empire novel Daughter of Earth reveal for what it is — a civilization that has gutted its own best consciousness. The great novels of the dispossessed demand a revolution in action to go with a revolution in knowledge and feeling.

Agnes Smedley was buried somewhat prominently in Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing with a headstone that reads:

The opening of Daughter of Earth:

Before me stretches a Danish sea. Cold, gray, limitless. There is no horizon. The sea and the gray sky blend and become one. A bird, with outspread wings, takes its way over the depths.

For months I have been here, watching the sea—and writing this story of a human life. What I have written is not a work of beauty, created that someone may spend an hour pleasantly; not a symphony to lift up the spirit, to release it from the dreariness of reality. It is the story of a life, written in desperation, in unhappiness.

I write of the earth on which we all, by some strange circumstance, happen to be living. I write of the joys and sorrows of the lowly. Of loneliness. Of pain. And of love.

The sky before me has been as gray as my spirit these days. There is no horizon—as in my life. For thirty years I have lived, and for these years I have drunk from the wells of bitterness. I have loved, and bitterness left me for that hour. But there are times when love itself is bitter.

Now I stand at the end of one life and on the threshold of another. Contemplating. Weighing. About me lie the ruins of a life. Instead of blind faith—directness, unbounded energy; and instead of unclearness, I now have the knowledge that comes from experience; work that is limitless in its scope and significance. Is not this enough to weigh against love?

I gaze over the waters and consider. There have been days when it seemed that my path would better lead into the sea. But now I choose otherwise.

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