Erskine Caldwell, Margaret Bourke-White, and the Popular Front (Moscow 1941).

Erskine Caldwell, Margaret Bourke-White, and the Popular Front (Moscow 1941). PDF

Author: Jay E. Caldwell

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 643

ISBN-13:

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Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White traveled to the U.S.S.R. in 1941 on their and their editor's hunch that something newsworthy was in the offing. The couple went in part to add to their library of phototext books (three had been published since 1936), but more to advance the agenda of the anti-Fascist, anti-isolationist Leftist Popular Front, whose goals coincided with those of the Roosevelt administration. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, they immediately immersed themselves in the enterprise of bringing war news to the American listening and reading public. Through the portals of CBS radio, Life magazine, PM newspaper, and other journalistic outlets, and despite stultifying censorship, they made it clear that the Red Army was a formidable anti-Hitler force that wanted only financial and material assistance from the U.S., and that the Russian people, steeped in patriotism and family values not very different from American ideals, were worthy allies. Stalin, they hinted, was a well-intentioned and well-organized autocrat, but nothing worse. Upon returning to the United States, Bourke-White traveled extensively to promote a Russian-American alliance, and published a photo-chronicle of their Russian trip, Shooting the Russian War. Caldwell published two very different books, All-Out on the Road to Smolensk and All Night Long, that also advocated this coalition. I argue that Caldwell composed Smolensk as a heroic quest to report on the war firsthand, while All Night Long, a popular and sensational story about Russian guerillas, bears all the characteristics of a Socialist Realist novel touting the Soviet cause. Both books were successful in endorsing Soviet objectives in the West. Their individual and collaborative literary products have been largely forgotten, but Bourke-White's photographs continue to inform our memory of that war.

Portrait of Myself

Portrait of Myself PDF

Author: Margaret Bourke-White

Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing

Published: 2016-08-09

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1787200914

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This is the story of the internationally acclaimed American woman Margaret Bourke-White, who for over thirty years made photographic history: as the first photographer to see the artistic and storytelling possibilities in American industry, as the first to write social criticism with a lens, and as the most distinguished and venturesome foreign correspondent-with-a-camera to report wars, politics and social and political revolution on three continents. In this poignant autobiography, Bourke-White details her fight against Parkinson’s disease, and recounts tales of her struggles to master her art and craft, of photographing Stalin, Gandhi and many other notables, of being torpedoed off North Africa while reporting World War II, of flying combat missions, of photographing the dread murder camps of Nazi Germany, of touring Tobacco Road to produce the book You Have Seen Their Faces with Erskine Caldwell (whom she later married), of adventures—and wonderful picture-taking—in the mines of South Africa, in the frozen North, in war-torn Korea. Illustrated throughout with over 70 of Margaret Bourke-White’s fine photographs, this is the great life story of a great American, greatly yet modestly told.

Realism for the Masses

Realism for the Masses PDF

Author: Chris Vials

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2010-04-13

Total Pages: 459

ISBN-13: 1496800362

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Realism for the Masses is an exploration of how the concept of realism entered mass culture, and from there, how it tried to remake “America.” The literary and artistic creations of American realism are generally associated with the late nineteenth century. But this book argues that the aesthetic actually saturated American culture in the 1930s and 1940s and that the Left social movements of the period were in no small part responsible. The book examines the prose of Carlos Bulosan and H. T. Tsiang; the photo essays of Margaret Bourke-White in Life magazine; the bestsellers of Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Mitchell; the boxing narratives of Clifford Odets, Richard Wright, Nelson Algren; and the Hollywood boxing film, radio soap operas, and the domestic dramas of Lillian Hellman and Shirley Graham, and more. These writers and artists infused realist aesthetics into American mass culture to an unprecedented degree and also built on a tradition of realism in order to inject influential definitions of “the people” into American popular entertainment. Central to this book is the relationship between these mass cultural realisms and emergent notions of pluralism. Significantly, Vials identifies three nascent pluralisms of the 1930s and 1940s: the New Deal pluralism of “We're the People” in The Grapes of Wrath; the racially inclusive pluralism of Vice President Henry Wallace's “The People's Century”; and the proto-Cold War pluralism of Henry Luce's “The American Century.”

Realism for the Masses

Realism for the Masses PDF

Author: Chris Vials

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2010-04-13

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1604733497

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Realism for the Masses is an exploration of how the concept of realism entered mass culture, and from there, how it tried to remake “America.” The literary and artistic creations of American realism are generally associated with the late nineteenth century. But this book argues that the aesthetic actually saturated American culture in the 1930s and 1940s and that the Left social movements of the period were in no small part responsible. The book examines the prose of Carlos Bulosan and H. T. Tsiang; the photo essays of Margaret Bourke-White in Life magazine; the bestsellers of Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Mitchell; the boxing narratives of Clifford Odets, Richard Wright, Nelson Algren; and the Hollywood boxing film, radio soap operas, and the domestic dramas of Lillian Hellman and Shirley Graham, and more. These writers and artists infused realist aesthetics into American mass culture to an unprecedented degree and also built on a tradition of realism in order to inject influential definitions of “the people” into American popular entertainment. Central to this book is the relationship between these mass cultural realisms and emergent notions of pluralism. Significantly, Vials identifies three nascent pluralisms of the 1930s and 1940s: the New Deal pluralism of “We're the People” in The Grapes of Wrath; the racially inclusive pluralism of Vice President Henry Wallace's “The People's Century”; and the proto-Cold War pluralism of Henry Luce's “The American Century.”

You Have Seen Their Faces

You Have Seen Their Faces PDF

Author: Erskine Caldwell

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 134

ISBN-13: 082031692X

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In the middle years of the Great Depression, Erskine Caldwell and photographer Margaret Bourke-White spent eighteen months traveling across the back roads of the Deep South--from South Carolina to Arkansas--to document the living conditions of the sharecropper. Their collaboration resulted in You Have Seen Their Faces, a graphic portrayal of America's desperately poor rural underclass. First published in 1937, it is a classic comparable to Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, and James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which it preceded by more than three years. Caldwell lets the poor speak for themselves. Supported by his commentary, they tell how the tenant system exploited whites and blacks alike and fostered animosity between them. Bourke-White, who sometimes waited hours for the right moment, captures her subjects in the shacks where they lived, the depleted fields where they plowed, and the churches where they worshipped.

The People's Writer

The People's Writer PDF

Author: Wayne Mixon

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9780813916279

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Most critics have considered Caldwell to be only a minor southern writer, often associating him with his worst writing. Yet Saul Bellow suggested he deserved the Nobel Prize, and William Faulkner once characterized him as one of the five best writers of his time, alongside himself, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos.

Cuba, the United States, and Cultures of the Transnational Left, 1930–1975

Cuba, the United States, and Cultures of the Transnational Left, 1930–1975 PDF

Author: John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-10-20

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1316467775

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This book examines the ways in which Cuba's revolutions of 1933 and 1959 became touchstones for border-crossing endeavors of radical politics and cultural experimentation over the mid-twentieth century. It argues that new networks of solidarity building between US and Cuban allies also brought with them perils and pitfalls that could not be separated from the longer history of US empire in Cuba. As US and Cuban subjects struggled together towards common aspirations of racial and gender equality, fairer distribution of wealth, and anti-imperialism, they created a unique index of cultural work that widens our understanding of the transition between hemispheric modernism and postmodernism. Canvassing poetry, music, journalism, photographs, and other cultural expressions around themes of revolution, this book seeks new understanding of how race, gender, and nationhood could shift in meaning and materialization when traveling across the Florida Straits.

The Angelic Mother and the Predatory Seductress

The Angelic Mother and the Predatory Seductress PDF

Author: Ashley Craig Lancaster

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2012-06-20

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0807144460

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In The Angelic Mother and the Predatory Seductress, Ashley Craig Lancaster examines how converging political and cultural movements helped to create dualistic images of southern poor white female characters in Depression-era literature. While other studies address the familial and labor issues that challenged female literary characters during the 1930s, Lancaster focuses on how the evolving eugenics movement reinforced the dichotomy of altruistic maternal figures and destructive sexual deviants. According to Lancaster, these binary stereotypes became a new analogy for hope and despair in America's future and were well utilized by Depression-era politicians and authors to stabilize the country's economic decline. As a result, the complexity of women's lives was often overlooked in favor of stock characters incapable of individuality. Lancaster studies a variety of works, including those by male authors William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, and John Steinbeck, as well as female novelists Mary Heaton Vorse, Myra Page, Grace Lumpkin, and Olive Tilford Dargan. She identifies female stereotypes in classics such as To Kill a Mockingbird and in the work of later writers Dorothy Allison and Rick Bragg, who embrace and share in a poor white background. The Angelic Mother and the Predatory Seductress reveals that these literary stereotypes continue to influence not only society's perception of poor white southern women but also women's perception of themselves.

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