Author Description

Per Seyersted s Robert Cantwell: An American 1930s Radical Writer and His Apostasy is an exceedingly unusual, inventive, and distinguished contribution to 20th century United States cultural, intellectual, and political history in several respects. Seyersted s focus is on the career of Robert Cantwell, a promising novelist from the Northwestern United States who was a much-admired pro-Communist literary talent in the early 1930s, but who steadily evolved to the Right and vanished into the relative obscurity of the mass market publishing industry in subsequent decades. Cantwell s name is certainly recognizable to most scholars of United States literary radicalism, but the central mystery of what happened to him has never been explained. Seyersted s extraordinarily researched book now answers that question in a manner that sheds new light on a variety of other issues, and offers a highly detailed fresh paradigm for the radical literary experience that will absorb a broad range of readers. Alan Wald Director of the Program in American Culture University of Michigan