Rebinding “The Book of the Dead” into Muriel Rukeyser’s U.S. 1 (1938)

Abstract

Scholars have skillfully analyzed Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead” for how it manifests modernist discourses, but decontexualizations have led to substantial oversights. Analysis of “The Book of the Dead” has been isolated from its original place of publication, U.S. 1. (Covici·Friede, 1938; figure 6.1). Considering the sequence’s role within the collection as a whole reveals its ideal audience as educated urbanites and the role that Rukeyser wants them to take against world fascism. This literal decontextualization also has occurred regarding sequence’s (and hence book’s) relationship to Rukeyser’s life and place in the literary field. Rukeyser became part of the leftist literary network via a Communist-affiliated student newspaper, which led her into associations with Horace Gregory, John Reed Clubs, the New Masses, the New Republic, and Covici·Friede. In short, Rukeyser scripted U.S. 1 and “The Book of the Dead” in light of readers in (and recruiting readers to) the Popular Front, whose model of interaction with minority and repressed cultures was the moral crusader John Brown. This chapter reconciles Rukeyser’s beguiling theory of poetry and readership with the relations among Rukeyser, U.S. 1, publishers, and a few highly educated readers. These recontextualized facets allows us to gauge the important but limited work of U.S. 1.