The final volume in an essential trilogy that includes Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (2002) and Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade (2007), Alan Wald's American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War is a masterful work of cultural history, collective biography, and literary criticism. It is also the capstone of an unparalleled career excavating, examining, and making sense of the literary left in the United States.

Apparently Wald originally aimed to produce a single volume on the largely unexamined legacies of the literary left in the 1930s and beyond. However, we should be grateful that he produced three volumes instead. With the third volume now published, and a striking range of material unearthed and analyzed, it strikes me that one great gift of Wald's scholarship is that even after Wald's copious, expansive research, the work still invites further investigation by other scholars, raises as many questions as it answers, and opens new avenues for investigation. But to follow Wald's lead in investigating the mid-twentieth-century literary left in the United States is to recognize his ground rules, which are not for the faint of heart. The first of these ground rules Wald succinctly states near the very end of American Night: “Insisting on complexity is the best challenge to deceitful simplifications, Left and Right” (294). Such “simplifications,” I would argue, may not be intentionally “deceitful”; they may simply reflect the fact that few scholars have the depth of historical and philosophical knowledge, the patience for extensive archival research and in-person interviews, and the sensitivity necessary to see utopian impulses toward social justice coexisting in many individuals with a willingness to excuse the violence and repression that accompanied the Soviet project, a project that cannot be separated from the communist movement in the United States.

While Wald's sympathies are clearly with the communist-influenced fiction writers, poets, and essayists whose work he discusses, he also insists that their work be understood in relation to the indelible stain that Stalinism – as well as McCarthyism (the more obvious target of a critic with leftist sympathies) – has left upon the literary oeuvre of the post-World War II left: “Stalinism,” Wald writes, “is a reminder of the calamity that results from the subordination of one's socialist commitment to an idealized regime professing political values one endorses, blotting out one facet to embellish another” (321). And here he establishes a ground rule that might apply not only to creative writers, but to scholars: “Marxist [or, one could argue, any radical] commitment should be consistently aimed at the primacy of abolishing exploitation and political persecution. Pro-Sovietism and its offshoots have been as damaging to the Left as comparable ingenuousness about the inconsistencies of Western democracies had been for well-intentioned liberals and conservatives” (ibid.).

American Night repeatedly showcases Wald's commitment to highlighting rather than smoothing over complexity and inconsistency. Likewise, it demonstrates his ability to recognize grave faults (particularly those concerning “Stalinism” and wilful blindness toward Soviet atrocities) in figures he nonetheless praises for remarkable but often unappreciated cultural contributions. The discussion of communist critic Sam Sillen is particularly revealing here, for it recognizes the “genuineness” of his experience, and the psychological benefits of the certainty that communist faith provided for him:

The breadth and depth of Wald's research and analysis, encompassing literally dozens of actors, is dazzling. The book is attuned to historical and biographical contexts – including not just formal and informal political associations, but also social circles, romantic relationships, and professional appointments – and the form and content of literary works themselves. Together, form, content, and context reveal the affective relationship that individuals had with communism. The latter Wald considers both in relation to the Soviet Union's indelible influence and as an impulse that, especially after World War II, often existed apart from formal party affiliation.

As for the content of the book itself, what sets this volume of the trilogy apart from the others is its focus on silence and absence, the “covert agonies” as well as the “new contingency” that typify the “Communist modernism” of the Cold War (xvii, xiv and xvi). At the crux of this form was a great paradox: “artists who yearned to hone their craft for the liberation of humanity [became] identified as crude propagandists on behalf of cultural dictatorship” (xvii). At the same time, many of these same artists began to quietly question the logic of Soviet communism even as they retained the impulses that had produced confident commitment in earlier decades.

The “covert agonies” that Wald identifies in novels, poetry, literary criticism and essays by a range of writers are linked to the absences in the cultural record that tend to confuse terminology, particularly for the cultural outsiders – African Americans, Jews, homosexuals, bohemian artists, etc. – who, Wald maintains, were more likely than others to find their way into the communist milieu. Wald acknowledges the particular challenges that the Cold War has created for cultural historians interested in gays, communists, and other outsiders, as well as the intersections of various identities that often became suspect in a Cold War context:

According to Wald, the “evasiveness” that led many to define themselves as “progressives” or “New Dealers,” or to destroy, disguise, or hide parts of their own record, “allowed too many scholars, especially authors of overviews of literary history, to fluctuate between near-silence about writers' political biographies and oversimplifications regarding the Communist tradition” (297). This has distorted the historical record, Wald insists, creating a “retrospective Cold War collective literary identity that is fundamentally disfigured by the absent presence of a tradition that dare not speak its name” (297).

In addition to chapters covering individuals who were “pink” in both senses of the word at a time when public revelation of either identity could ruin an individual's livelihood, Wald devotes chapters to Jewish writers, African Americans, literary critics, and communist modernist poets. He recognizes variety but also finds commonalities among members of these groups; for instance, he finds among Jewish writers on the left a particular “Left melancholia” (217) that grew out of the “multiple alienations” (218) that Jewish writers experienced, in their reaction to the legacy of the Holocaust and continuing anti-Semitism, their alienation from religious Judaism, and their “opposition to the commercialization of culture in the 1950s,” as well as, in many cases, “the stifling mentality generated by pro-Communists and Progressives under the spell of late antifascism” (216). The tremendous contributions of African American writers Chester Himes, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright are appreciated but their complicated political convictions are also dissected and criticized; in particular, Wald condemns the fact that these writers viewed the Hitler–Stalin pact as “a step forward,” for in its retreat from antifascism the Communist Party put the struggle for African American rights “on center stage” (151). So, too, Wald suggests that many writers of color overvalued the Soviet Union's commitment to anticolonialism.

The book alternates between sections devoted to individual biography and close readings of particular works (e.g. Kenneth Fearing's The Big Clock (1946), Ann Petry's The Street (1946), Vera Caspary's Laura (1942), Abraham Polonsky's The World Above (1951), or Thomas McGrath's Letters to an Imaginary Friend (1963), as well as unfinished and/or unpublished works that complicate existing understandings of various authors' cultural contribution). The book consciously focusses on lesser-known dimensions of the literary left's contributions after World War II, not addressing Lillian Hellman or Dashiell Hammett or Arthur Miller's responses to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, or other stories that have already received scholarly attention. Wald treats the literary criticism and reviews published in communist-dominated organs like New Masses, Masses and Mainstream, and Jewish Life as criticism worthy of scholarly examination even as he recognizes that much of it is “crude and pompous” and narrow-minded, contributing to an “earnest mediocrity” that characterized a significant portion of the “lesser-known Left writing” (94).

At the same time, Wald insists that much of the work he groups under the label of “Communist literary modernism” enriches and complicates understandings of modernism more generally, and ought to be given greater attention by literary scholars: “Communist literary modernism is not a development within modernism, a ‘late modernism,’” he writes, “but an evolution of the social realism already in commerce with a modernism that emerges into a third tradition through a strategy of psychological intensities” (303). He says that what distinguishes this brand of modernism from “the modernism of formalism” is its “contentism,” or “its emphasis on experience and perception” (ibid.).

At its heart American Night challenges customary accounts of a “long retreat” of literary radicalism after the 1930s. However, Wald's earlier work in a range of venues – including the collection of previously published essays in Writing from the Left (1994), which laid the groundwork for much of the analysis in his trilogy devoted to that subject – already firmly established that leftist literary production continued after the 1930s, if often in less visible forms. Today, once widely accepted understandings of what literary critic Thomas Schaub has called the “liberal narrative,” of radical commitment borne of youthful idealism leading to Cold War “realism,” are now widely recognized as offering a woefully incomplete picture. If Wald had already convinced many of us that the literary left continued to be a significant force in American letters after the 1930s, American Night vividly illustrates the richness and complexity of leftist cultural contributions after the Second World War.