Introduction

Abstract

This chapter provides a definition of the US proletarian literature of the 1930s as a modernist practice: modernist, because the authors included in the study perceived themselves as members of an artistic avant-garde; a practice because their work was intended to achieve political results. Locating his work in relation to the strand of revisionary literary history associated with critics such as Alan Wald, Barbara Foley and Paula Rabinowitz, Cooper sets out the case that key writers, particularly Erskine Caldwell and Ralph Ellison, innovated, post-World War II, literary forms which matched radical lineage with the promise of technological change.