"[Foley] substantially refutes the received wisdom that writers within the Communist Party and its periphery produced a degraded, politically compromised body of work because they followed a formula dictated from the party leadership. I cannot imagine anyone interested in politics and literature not taking this book as required reading. It will also be of great interest to American Studies, Cultural Studies and historians and sociologists of culture."--Stanley Aronowitz, CUNY Graduate Center

Preface vii
Part One
1. The Legacy of Anti-Communism 3
2. Influences on American Proletarian Literature 44
3. Defining Proletarian Litearture 86
4. Art or Propaganda? 129
5. Race, Class, and the "Negro Question" 170
6. Women and the Left in the 1930s 213
Part Two
7. Realism and Didacticism in Proletarian Fiction 249
8. The Proletarian Fictional Autobiography 284
9. The Proletarian Bildungsroman 321
10. The Proletarian Social Novel 362
11. The Collective Novel 398
Afterword 443
Index 447