Happy birthday, Max Eastman

It is the birthday of writer and radical activist Max Eastman (1883), a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance and co-founder of the radical magazine The Liberator in 1919. Earlier, as editor of the socialist magazine The Masses, Eastman stood trial twice on charges of sedition for editorials critical of U.S. participation in World War I. He was acquitted both times. The Liberator published works of John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and E.E. Cummings. Eastman visited Russia in the 1920s and later wrote critically of Joseph Stalin, though he supported Leon Trotsky. Later in life, he became fiercely anti-socialist and anti-communist, and an outspoken conservative.

Happy birthday, Archibald MacLeish

It is the birthday of writer Archibald MacLeish (1892), who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice, for his collection Conquistador (1933), and for his collection Collected Poems 1917-1952 (1953) and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1959 for his free-verse play J.B., a modern version of the biblical story of Job. JB also won a Tony Award for best play. MacLeish was greatly influenced by poets Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and is considered a traditional modernist. His best-known poem is Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry). It includes a line that states the modernist poetic philosophy: "A poem should not mean/but be." As a young man, MacLeish left the law firm he worked for and went to Paris in 1923, joining literary and artistic expatriates such as John Dos Passos, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, John O'Hara, Cole Porter, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway. President Franklin Roosevelt appointed him Librarian of Congress in 1939. He reorganized the library, making it more efficient and enabling it to meet the needs of the nation. He expanded the library's budget and helped focus its mission to collect materials expressing the life an achievements of the people of the United States. During the 1940s and 1950s, he was the target of such anti-Communists as Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. To detractors he said, "No one would be more shocked to learn I am a Communist than the Communists themselves."

Van Wyck Brooks was top literary critic

Van Wyck Brooks on Time cover in 1944

It is the birthday of literary historian Van Wyck Brooks (1886), whose detailed study of early American literature, The Flowering of New England (1936), won the Pulitzer Prize for history and the National Book Award. It is notable for placing such writers as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau into historical context, examining the social, religious, and political forces of the nation and the region that affected these literary icons.

The book was part of his Finders and Makers series that covered American literary history from 1800 to 1915. Books from the series also include New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1916 (1940), The World of Washington Irving (1944), The Times of Melville and Whitman (1947), and The Confident Years: 1885-1915 (1952). Indian Summer was well received and was a best seller. Brooks was hailed for his vivid style and clarity. He drew from the letters and other contemporary documents to paint clear pictures of the men and their times.

Brooks' volume, On Literature Today (1941), harshly criticized the likes of Thomas Wolfe, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway, whose dim views of humankind were in direct conflict with Brooks' desire for literature of affirmation rooted in an abiding faith in human nature.

Brooks graduated from Harvard University in 1908. While he was a student, he published with a friend his first collection of poetry, Verses by Two Undergraduates. He followed that with The Wine of the Puritans (1909), his first book of literary criticism. Brooks wrote that Puritanism had a profound effect on the formation of American culture and ideas.

Brooks also wrote a detailed study of the great American author Samuel L. Clemens in The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920). He blamed the author's shortcomings on Twain's mother and wife.

Max Eastman was left before he was right

Max Eastman

It is the birthday of writer Max Eastman (1883), who was a prominent political activist, first for left-wing causes, then later for right-wing, anti-Communist movements. In later life, he described himself as a radical conservative. He was an avid supporter of the Harlem Renaissance. When he was 30, Eastman became editor of the socialist magazine The Masses. In his late 50s, he became a roving editor for Reader's Digest. In his 70s, he was a contributing editor to the conservative National Review.

Eastman was born in upstate New York to parents who were protestant ministers. He graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts in 1915 and pursued a doctorate in philosophy at Columbia University but withdrew before accepting it. He studied under pragmatic philosopher John Dewey. Eastman lived in Greenwich Village with his sister and became active in the women's suffrage movement.

As editor of The Masses, he published the work of novelist Sherwood Anderson, Marxist Louise Bryant, poets Amy Lowell and Carl Sandburg, and Taos arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan. He advocated free love and birth control, denounced America's participation in World War I, and supported socialist Jack Reed's trip to Russia to report on the Bolshevik Revolution. He created, with his sister, The Liberator magazine and published the work of Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, and Helen Keller. He lived for almost two years in the Soviet Union and watched the power plays between Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky. He became Trotsky's friend. But his views of socialism began to change after his visit to Soviet Russia.

During the Depression, Eastman became critical of such socialist thinkers Karl Marx and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He became friends with British economist Friedrich Hayek and arranged for his book The Road to Serfdom (1943) to be serialized in Reader's Digest. At first, he supported Sen. Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist activism, but later criticized him as being too reactionary. Nevertheless, he grew to believe the Bolshevik Revolution had produced tyranny instead of freedom. Eastman was among the first contributing editors for the National Review and served on its Board of Associates but he eventually resigned because the magazine's pro-Christian leanings didn't jibe with his atheism. Eastman opposed the Vietnam War.

Among his books and articles are Enjoyment of Poetry (1913), The Sense of Humor (1921), Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth (1925), Since Lenin Died (1925), Marx and Lenin: The Science of Revolution (1927), Enjoyment of Laughter (1936), Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955), and Seven Kinds of Goodness (1967).