James Farrell and James Cain (was Re: Michael Moore Responds)

[Louis Proyect]

At 08:01 PM 5/29/98 -0500, you wrote:
>This from Michael Denning's _The Cultural Front_:
>
>Farrell's hostility to the industrialization of writing extended to the
>trade union responses of the "mystery-plot mechanics" and Hollywood
>scenarists. When the mystery novelist James M. Cain, together with the
>left-wing of the Screen Writers' Guild, led a campaign in 1946 to create an
>American Authors' Authority to protect the copyrights of all writers in all
>fields, Farrell became its most visible and vocal opponent, seeing it as a
>bureaucratic and Stalinist threat to the freedom of writers. (108)
>
>Yoshie

Farrell, like most of the writers grouped around the Partisan Review, began
to shift to the right after WWII, when the cold war began.

The purpose of Denning's book, by the way, is to define the parameters of
the period under question as those of the CP and its milieu. People like
Mike Gold loom very important while the Trotskyist intelligentsia are
hardly dealt with at all. To understand this period it is necessary to read
Alan Wald as well, who deals with figures like Farrell and the "NY
Intellectuals" with great sensitivity.

Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)