Review, Douglas Wixson, Jack Conroy and the Tradition of Midwestern Literary Radicalism, 1898-1990 (University of Illinois Press, 1994)

Indiana Magazine of History, June 1995

Jack Conroy’s literary reputation rests primarily on one novel and his editorship of three short-lived, small-circulation, Depression-era magazines. In terms of quantity, this output would hardly seem sufficient to justify such a massive biography. But as Douglas Wixson argues, Conroy’s importance far exceeds his specific literary production. As editor of Rebel Poet, Anvil, and New Anvil, Conroy fostered the growth and recognition of a wide range of midwestern and southern worker-writers, including Erskine Caldwell, Richard Wright, Meridel Le Sueur, and Nelson Algren. In his autobiographical proletarian novel, The Disinherited, Conroy drew on “the subliterary traditions of orality and worker expression” to capture brilliantly the working-class culture of midwestern mining communities and factories. Finally, Wixson demonstrates the way in which Conroy symbolized a broad-based, midwestern radicalism that has been largely overlooked by historians.

In using the label “worker-writer,” Wixson emphasizes that Conroy viewed his literary career and proletarian labor experience as mutually reinforcing. Unlike most writers from worker-class backgrounds, Conroy did not see his talents as a means of escaping into the middle class. Rather, he made a conscious decision to remain a worker and use his writing to convey working-class experience. Conroy viewed literature as a weapon in the class struggle, necessary, as Wixson says, “to reproduce from the fragmented evidence of a confused and broken reality a coherent narrative that remains true to the heterogeneous cultural diversity and irregular textures of the original experience.”

Drawing on recent literary theory, Wixson traces the wide range of influences on Conroy’s writing that enabled him to transform his personal experiences into the story of an entire class—the economically dispossessed workers during the Depression. “In place of strong authorial discourse and carefully delineated psychological characterizations,” Wixson comments, “Conroy’s writing in this period explores the intertextual relations of his experience and reading, crossing the line repeatedly between oral and literary, folk vision and social history.” This intimate familiarity with proletarian culture also made Conroy an outstanding folklorist when he worked for the Illinois Writers’ Project in the late 1930s.

The book’s greatest strength is in the way it recaptures the socioliterary culture of midwestern radicals in the 1920s and 1930s. Often ignored in histories of the American left, midwestern radical thought tended to be much less ideological and more individualistic and eccentric than the east coast variety. Wixson recaptures not only the spirit and character of this culture, but also the processes by which it was disseminated. Because of the vast geographical distance separating them, midwestern radical intellectuals often communicated through letters for years before actually meeting. In this way, an extensive epistolary network was established, connecting various isolated radicals into a grass-roots network. Out of this community of correspondents—nearly all of whom, like Conroy, were “worker-writers”—emerged the journals which Conroy edited. Wixson also discusses in great detail the problematic relations between this group of organic intellectuals and the Communist party, which always distrusted the individualism of the midwesterners. But as Wixson makes clear in this fine biography, the same elements that made Conroy such a suspect Communist—his belief in democracy, decentralization, and grass-roots activism—made him an effective spokesperson for the “disinherited.”