Proletarian realism’s aspiration to depict the social totality stresses the causal connections among antagonistically opposed classes in capitalist society, a critical examination of the ideological standpoints accompanying this antagonism, and the working-class struggle for liberation from the yoke of capital. The sense of dialectical possibility informing many works of US proletarian realism – which were largely produced during the Great Depression – reflects the abiding influence of the Bolshevik Revolution. While guided by a sense of the social world as a process in motion, thus “drawing their poetry from the future,” as Marx wrote, works in this genre frequently stress the fetters – material but above all ideological –preventing the proletariat from grasping the social totality in which it is inserted. Proletarian novels deploy a range of techniques, both realist and modernist, to bring to the awareness of the reader historical forces often beyond the ken of individual characters. Realism is thus a matter not just of style and structure but also of epistemology – the text’s aspiration to grasp the social totality is an aspiration toward the truth that will liberate the proletariat from its chains.