proletarian novel

The great proletarian novels of our time have been produced not by Russians but by African Americans, Japanese, Germans, and—perhaps most proletarian of all—a German American living in Mexico, B. Traven. Government control and censorship can inhibit literary development, perhaps deform it a little, and can destroy…

…them the accents of the proletarian literature movement, then at its height.

Meanwhile, the “proletarian” novel had been developed by writers concerned with the miseries of the working class, particularly Martin Koch and Ivar Lo-Johansson. There was particularly harsh criticism of working-class conditions in stories by Jan Fridegård. Vilhelm Moberg wrote novels of peasant life but achieved his greatest…

A number of authors wrote proletarian novels attacking capitalist exploitation, as in several novels based on a 1929 strike in the textile mills in Gastonia, N.C., such as Fielding Burke’s Call Home the Heart and Grace Lumpkin’s To Make My Bread (both 1932). Other notable proletarian novels included Jack Conroy’s…