Wald, Alan M. 1946–

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Wald, Alan M. 1946–

(Alan Maynard Wald)

PERSONAL:

Born June 1, 1946, in Washington, DC; son of Haskell Philip Wald (an economist) and Ruth Jacobs (a special education teacher); married Celia Stodola (an obstetrical nurse), June 13, 1975 (died, May 7, 1992); children: Sarah, Hannah. Ethnicity: "Jewish-American." Education: Antioch College, B.A., 1969; University of California, Berkeley, M.A., 1971, Ph.D., 1974.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Ann Arbor, MI. Office—Department of English, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

San Jose State University, San Jose, CA, lecturer in English, 1974; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, assistant professor, 1975-81, associate professor, 1981-86, professor of English, 1986—, Michigan humanities fellow, 1995, A. Bartlett Giamatti faculty fellow at Institute for the Humanities, 1997-98, director of the Program in American Culture, 2000-03. Institute for Critical Research and Social Change, Amsterdam, Netherlands, member of supervisory board.

MEMBER:

Modern Language Association of America (member of delegate assembly, 1999-2001), American Studies Association (member of national board of directors, 1993-96).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Woodrow Wilson fellow, 1969; fellow of American Council of Learned Societies, 1983-84; Beinecke fellow, Yale University, 1989; Guggenheim fellow, 1999-2000.

WRITINGS:

James T. Farrell: The Revolutionary Socialist Years, New York University Press (New York, NY), 1978.

(Contributor) Ralph Bogardus and Fred Hobson, editors, Literature at the Barricades: The American Writer in the 1930s, University of Alabama Press (Birmingham, AL), 1982.

The Revolutionary Imagination: The Poetry and Politics of John Wheelwright and Sherry Mangan, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1983.

(Contributor) Phyliss and Julis Jacobson, editors, Socialist Perspectives, Karz-Cohl (Princeton, NJ), 1983.

(Contributor) Bernard Johnpoll and Harvey Klehr, editors, Biographical Dictionary of the American Left, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1986.

The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1987.

(Author of introduction) Blackness of a White Night: Stories and Poems by Sherry Mangan, Arts End Books (Newton, MA), 1987.

(Contributor) Suzanne De Castell, Alan Luke, and Carem Luke, editors, Language, Authority, and Criticism, Falmer Press (London, England), 1989.

The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Selected Essays on Marxist Traditions in Cultural Commitment, Humanities (Atlantic Highlands, NJ), 1992.

(Author of introduction) Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1992.

(Author of introduction) James T. Farrell, A Note on Literary Criticism, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1993.

(Contributor) Michael Brown and other editors, New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism, Monthly Review Press (New York, NY), 1993.

Writing from the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics, Verso (London, England), 1994.

(Contributor) Philip Goldstein, editor, Styles of Cultural Activism: From Theory and Pedagogy to Women, Indians, and Communism, University of Delaware Press (Newark, DE), 1994.

(Author of introduction) Lloyd Brown, Iron City, Northeastern University Press (Boston, MA), 1994.

(Author of introduction) John Sanford, The People from Heaven, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1995.

(Contributor) Bill Mullen and Sherry Linkon, editors, Radical Revisions: Rereading 1930s Culture, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1996.

(Editor, with George Breitman and Paul Le Blanc, and contributor) Trotskyism in the United States: Historical Essays and Reconsiderations, Humanities, 1996.

(Author of introduction) Cry of the Tinamou: Stories by Sanora Babb, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1997.

(Author of introduction) Phillip Bonosky, Burning Valley, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1997.

(Contributor) Amitava Kumar, editor, Class Issues: Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and the Public Sphere, New York University Press (New York, NY), 1997.

(Author of introduction) Alfred Maund, The Big Boxcar, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1998.

(Contributor) Working Papers in Cultural Studies, Ethnicity, and Race Relations, Washington State University Press (Pullman, WA), 1999.

Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2002.

Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2007.

Contributor to Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale (Detroit, MI). Editor of the series "The Radical Novel Reconsidered," University of Illinois Press. Contributor to periodicals, including Antioch Review, Boston Review, Jewish Currents, Marxist Perspectives, Nation, New York Times, Prospects, Radical America, and Twentieth-Century Literature. Assistant editor of American Jewish History, Clio, Michigan Quarterly Review, Monthly Review, Access, Radical History Review, Journal of Trotsky Studies, Labor History, Labour/ Travail, American Literature, Journal of American History, Cineaste, American Historical Review, and Reviews in American History; member of editorial board, Against the Current, American Literature, and Science and Society. Member of advisory board, Encyclopedia of the American Left, Garland Publishing (New York, NY).

SIDELIGHTS:

Writer and educator Alan M. Wald was educated at Antioch College, then went on to earn his graduate degrees from the University of California at Berkeley. He has served on the faculty of San Jose State University and the University of Michigan, where he also spent time as the A. Bartlett Giamatti faculty fellow at the Institute for the Humanities and as the director of the Program in American Culture. His primary area of research and academic interest focuses on the works and lives of left-wing writers, and he himself has written and/or edited numerous books in the subjects of American leftist literature.

With Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left, Wald begins a planned trilogy of works that focus on the literary left in the United States during the mid-twentieth century. The book focuses on the biographies of approximately thirty American writers of the period, each of whom had Communist leanings. Through chronicles of their lives and work, Wald attempts to link their politics to their artistic endeavors, as well as comparing their literary output. Stephen Schwartz, writing for New Criterion, noted that the majority of the writers that Wald includes in the book "remained loyal to the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA), through its worst period: that of the Great Purges, the betrayal of the Spanish Republic, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and the purges and murders following the Second World War." He went on to observe, however, that "most of them were also untalented hacks, although some, depressingly, began with talent and suffocated it in the service of Stalin's secret police." Schwartz concluded: "Wald refuses to awake from history's nightmare and seeks to use it to draw others into a state of intellectual sleepwalking." Marianne Orme, in a somewhat milder review for Library Journal, noted that in some instances Wald neglects to define more obscure literary terms and various historical allusions, but concluded that "the study is still valuable for assessing the contributions of numerous individual writers."

Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade, which was published in 2007, addresses the work of American Communist writers during the 1930s and 1940s. Wald attempts to sort through these artists and determine which, if any of them, succeeded in making some sort of breakthrough in craft or style as well as a maturity in political thought while under the influence of their Communist beliefs. He focuses on writers using their adherence to Communism as a way to fight Fascism in Europe, which appeared outwardly far more damaging, particularly to Jewish writers. Much of the research involved in culling together this work required Wald to determine the true identities behind numerous pseudonyms used during the period. Ron Capshaw, reviewing the book for the Weekly Standard, remarked that "Wald concludes his study on a celebratory note, where writers artistically break out of the sectarian press into the more mainstream pulp audiences. But with the party's simple categorizations of good and evil, and their preference for conspiracy and masculinity, it is fair to say that these authors were always writing pulp."

Wald once told CA: "My scholarly writing should be understood as self-motivated, sublimated artistic work. That is, I think and feel like a novelist, poet, or sculptor, and create out of psychological necessity. But the forms in which I produce are those of the cultural historian, straining for the greatest accuracy through the examination of texts in light of a rounded biographical portraiture in social context, and assisted by information gleaned from personal papers and interviews with friends and family members of my subjects. One of my aims is to advance classical Marxist theory, but it is crucial to me that theory not be unmoored from rigorous empirical research. Another aim has been to maintain and develop the most honorable traditions of the U.S. cultural Left, especially the anti-racism inscribed at its core by the Communist movement of the 1930s and the internationalism promoted by those who, early on, recognized the brutal dictatorship of the Stalin regime in the U.S.S.R.

"As a high school student I was inspired by Richard Wright and Jean-Paul Sartre to formulate the issue of socialist ‘commitment’ as the locus of my concerns. I undertook my first project in the early 1970s, around the novelist James T. Farrell, as part of the search for the United States counterpart of the French litterature engage. In the late 1970s and early 1980s I was immersed in new developments in Marxist theory, distilling my conclusions about the intersection of Marxism and modernism in The Revolutionary Imagination: The Poetry and Politics of John Wheelwright and Sherry Mangan. By the middle of the 1980s I saw the activist New Left, which grew out of the 1960s and concretized my vision of a rich and meaningful life, becoming institutionalized in troubling ways. Part of the motivation for writing The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s was to underscore the dangers of the detachment of intellectuals from radical movements for social transformation. In the process I clarified my own sense of secular Jewish identity.

"Since I am repelled by proselytizers, I have tried to present, in these and my subsequent books, The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Selected Essays on Marxist Traditions in Cultural Commitment and Writing from the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics, the unvarnished contradictions and tensions evidenced in the careers of a range of cultural workers. Moreover, while I work within a broad, classical Marxist framework that views the radical culture of an era as produced in the context of social upheavals and mass movements, I make my unique contribution in the exploration of the mediating factors of human agency, especially the social networks of cultural workers, and of the idiosyncrasies of the ‘personal’ in the creative process.

"The most rewarding political work that I have experienced in recent years includes human rights trips to Nicaragua and Haiti, activist support of the union movement and affirmative action, and editorial board responsibilities for the journals Against the Current and Science and Society. My most inspiring scholarly work has centered on reissuing the writings of neglected left- wing authors for the University of Illinois Press series ‘The Radical Novel Reconsidered’ (which I edit), the Northeastern Library of Black Literature, Columbia University Press, and others. I am especially gratified when the publications involve living writers, with whom I am able to collaborate, such as John Sanford, Lloyd Brown, Sanora Babb, Ira Wolfert, Alexander Saxton, Philip Bonosky, Abraham Polonsky, Daniel Aaron, and Alfred Maund."