The Romance of American Communism

Description

"Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class." So begins Vivian Gornick's exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project. Now back in print after its initial publication in 1977 and with a new introduction by the author, The Romance of American Communism is a landmark work of new journalism, profiling American Communist Party members and fellow travelers as they joined the Party, lived within its orbit, and left in disillusionment and disappointment as Stalin's crimes became public. From the immigrant Jewish enclaves of the Bronx and Brooklyn and the docks of Puget Sound to the mining towns of Kentucky and the suburbs of Cleveland, over a million Americans found a sense of belonging and an expanded sense of self through collective struggle. They also found social isolation, blacklisting, imprisonment, and shattered hopes. This is their story--an indisputably American story.

Vivian Gornick is a writer and critic whose work has received two National Book Critics Circle Award nominations and been collected in The Best American Essays 2014. Growing up in the Bronx amongst communists and socialists, Gornick became a legendary writer for Village Voice, chronicling the emergence of the feminist movement in the 1970s. Her works include the memoirs Fierce Attachments (1987) and The Odd Woman and the City (2015) and the classic text on writing, The Situation and the Story.

Socialists often get caricatured as ideologues and automatons, zealots without an inner life. Gornick's Romance may be the best book ever written about that inner life. Yes, Gornick was talking about members of the Communist Party, but she was really talking about everyone in the socialist tradition who was fundamentally committed to creating a world without capitalism, why they saw their personal destiny bound up with that struggle, and what happened to them when they were confronted with its crushing disappointments and terrible realities. -- Corey Robin * New York Magazine * When we think of the Communist Party USA, we often associate it with the drab and monolithic "Marxist-Leninism" of the Soviet Union. But Gornick uncovers the rich network of social institutions, clubs, and dance halls that defined membership in the party for tens of thousands of Americans in the 1930s and '40s. -- Bhaskar Sunkara * New York Magazine * Whatever Gornick's subject, her writing relies on direct, lived experience. -- Elaine Blair * The Paris Review * One of the "Best Books for Understanding Socialism" -- Katy Schneider * New York Magazine * Gornick's language is so fresh and so blunt; it's a quintessentially American voice, and a beautiful one. -- Dwight Garner * New York Times * When first published in the 1970s, Vivian Gornick's book helped to launch her distinguished career as a writer and humanized, explained and, yes, romanticized, a generation of American radicals... Thanks to the dysfunctionality of American capitalism, socialism has reentered the American political vocabulary. Gornick introduces us to a slice of history we need to know. -- Eric Foner, author of Battles for Freedom I first read The Romance of American Communismin the early eighties, and it has been for many years the book I would rescue if my house was burning down. I based the the narrator of my first novel, The Cast Iron Shore, on the character of 'Diane Michaels", a vain shallow woman for whom communism had made her better than she was - 'it could all have been so much worse.' Vivian Gornick explores the passion of ideas rather than the ideas themselves, how they make us human. This book has languished out of print for far too long. -- Linda Grant, author of A Stranger City A profound guide to the ecstasy and despair of living a life structured by political commitment. These accounts of ordinary Communists will make you ache for such a coherent and purposeful world, even as Gornick shows with enormous sensitivity how it all fell apart. In our new era of political intensity, everyone should have this subtle and exquisite book on hand. -- Sarah Leonard Her unrepentant belief in strong feeling as the heartbeat of any political approach to the world explains why, though many good histories of American communism have appeared since Romance, none have captured, elevated, and lit up the experience in quite the same way. -- Lana Dee Povitz * Los Angeles Review of Books * She presents her interview subjects like characters in literature, as the protagonists of their own experience, and, for that reason, the book is not simply documentary but a work of literature, too, rich, moving, and contradictory. -- Alexandra Schwartz * The New Yorker * Most brilliantly evoked, however, is the exhilaration of conversion and the soul-expanding experience of finding a cause . again and again people speak of the sense of purpose and meaning they derived from being communists; they speak of a process of "becoming" and a sense of "wholeness": a cohesion between what they believed in and what they poured their life's efforts into. * Guardian * Romance is a color portrait against the black-and-white rhetoric of the Cold War.... The newfound interest in Romance speaks to a growing, shared desire to work, together, to extricate humankind from the trap in which it is now caught. -- Sophie Pinkham * The New Republic * First published in 1977, Gornick's book feels as relevant now as it ever did. As new secular movements, from reactionary atavism to progressive social justice activism, capture our imaginations and provide us with a feeling of belonging, The Romance of American Communism, provides a valuable glimpse into just how vital these movements can be - and how potent they are at creating community. -- Tara Isabella Burton * Washington Examiner * Gornick's task in Romance was clear. She wanted to rekindle [the] flame not for warmth but for illumination, to retrieve the truth of the communist experience, as it was lived from the inside, from the highbrow obscurantism of Cold War liberalism. -- Corey Robin * The Nation * Gornick offers no blueprints, but she teaches us that we must address the slippery ingredient of the emotions of a committed political life by first recognizing and naming them. Besides being wonderful, The Romance of American Communism is also a bit strange because it is so seductive. -- Alan Wald * Boston Review * A passionate, unwieldy auto-ethnographic work that zoomed out from her own upbringing to encompass the everyday life of the Communist Party in the United States... Gornick [is] interested in the prefigurative aspect of political organizing, in which action in the present serves not just as a step toward change in the future, but also as a model for that change. -- Ari Brostoff * n+1 * A crucial book for today's radical movements. -- Steven Wishnia * The Indypendent * The lasting value of her work lies in her commitment to the question of what it means to feel "expressive": to experience the feeling that tells a person "not approximately, but precisely" who they are. -- Dayna Tortorici * New York Review of Books * Gornick has continued in the genres she first discovered as a writer for the Voice: memoir, criticism, biography. Her prose has become tighter, more wrought, which suits her: the tension between her grand themes and compact prose recreates in the reader the combustion of original thought. -- Dayna Tortorici * NYRB * Extraordinary ... More than a political writer, Gornick is an intensely social writer: usually classified as an "oral history", Romance can be described as a book of conversations that is also about conversation, and about the relationship between conversation and conversion. -- Lola Seaton * New Statesman * A key go-to writer for those seeking insight on organised resistance in previous generations. -- Fiona O'Connor * Morning Star, Best Books of 2020 * In its exploration of the emotions, relationships, love and heartbreak of political commitment, Romance is an engrossing book. -- Charlie Morgan * Oral History *