Part of our time : some ruins and monuments of the thirties / Murray Kempton.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kempton, Murray, 1917-1997.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Subversive activities--United States--History--20th century.

Subversive activities.

United States.

History.

United States--History--1933-1945.

Communists--United States--Biography.

Communists.

Labor unions--United States--History--20th century.

Labor unions.

Nineteen thirties.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xiv, 425 pages ; 20 cm

Edition:

Modern Library edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Modern Library, 1998.

Summary:

First published in 1955 and long out of print, Part of Our Time consists of a series of brilliant "novellas" -- "portraits in depth" -- of real persons whose lives were transformed by the radical movements of the thirties -- "people who held at one time the conviction that the most important thing in life was a remorseless effort to throw down the society which had raised and alienated most of them". Some the decade made famous while others are scarcely remembered today. The portraits include not only Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, Walter Reuther, Lee Pressman, Paul Robeson, Edmund Wilson, and James Farrell, the writers of the Hollywood left, but many now forgotten union leaders, politicians, and mobsters -- all of them men and women who were caught up in what the author calls "the myth of the thirties".

"Enlightened, intelligent, possessed of a vast amount of American experience", Murray Kempton, Elizabeth Hardwick has written, "is a pleasure to read and an instruction in the art of prose". The reissue of Part of Our Time is a literary event of the first order.

This edition includes an Introduction by David Remnick, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of Lenin's Tomb, and a Foreword written by the author in 1967.

Notes:

Originally published: Simon & Schuster, 1955.

ISBN:

0679603107

OCLC:

39024727