'These were our times': Red -baiting, blacklisting, and the lost literature of dissent in mid-twentieth-century California

Throughout the anti-communism/McCarthy years, literature, like all cultural and intellectual productions, underwent repression that altered the cultural landscape of the twentieth century in both subtle and not so subtle ways. Preceding this trend was a renaissance of socially progressive literature that began in the 1930s: the Communist Party, the most vibrant of Left organizations at the time, formed multicultural writing groups and clubs, and sponsored literary magazines; labor schools with close ties to the Communist Party emerged around the country and became centers, not only for activist education, but for art and literature. By the late-1940s, however, the vitality of socially relevant working-class literature in the U.S. began to fade, as federal and state governments created special rules to keep progressive literature from being published and expelled Left critics from the universities. Because of this repression, a massive rupture occurred in the tradition of Left literature as a socially relevant and powerful force. One of the key consequences of this rupture was that literature became less diverse as the multiplicity of literary voices that emerged in the 1930s were quieted; as a result, there were fewer voices left to address the most important issues of the period, such as civil rights, civil liberties, and nuclear proliferation. Much of the literature that was not being widely distributed in the late-1940s and 1950s has been marginalized and even lost.;My dissertation demonstrates the process by which literature was separated from politics and society in the mid-century, the changes in literary production and distribution that occurred as a result of this process, the impact this separation has had for the development of socially relevant literature, and the importance of carefully examining the work of Left wing authors who wrote under political duress during this period. Chapter One provides a history of Left literature and censorship and argues for the importance of this literature for an historical understanding of the period. Chapter Two examines the effects of political exile on the work of George Oppen, who fled to Mexico with his family in 1950. Chapter Three analyzes Thomas McGrath's theories of political poetry and the ways that these theories played out in his writing. Chapter Four provides an introduction to the lost work of Naomi Replansky and argues for the importance of her poetry for the development of a Left literary history.;The poets I focus on all lived in California during the mid-century, and California, fueled by its major industries of agriculture, Hollywood, and defense, was a particularly complex amalgam of progressive and conservative thought. In order to explore the development of literature in relation to these historical tensions, I take a multiple critical approach, presenting historical and biographical analyses and using these analyses to ground and inform close readings. I approach the historical through the specific—through particular biographies of lives affected by McCarthyism, and specific literary productions that reflect the period.