Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade

The most general issue for the literary left was one of aesthetic and political strategy, a theme reflected in the experience of Ann Petry, whose novel, The Street (1946), dramatized the contemporary struggles of a single mother in Harlem. Petry had worked for the People's Voice, an African American newspaper founded in Harlem in 1942 by Adam clayton Powell, who worked closely with a local, often Communist, left that shared similar class-based anti-racist and anti-fascist politics. Petry wrote the novel out of her experience as a reporter and activist, and it was praised on the left as a work of social criticism; but for some critics the fact that the novel had a tragic outcome rather than a message of interracial class solidarity was a shortcoming. Petry stood her ground, arguing that the novelist should not be a "pamphleteer" or a "romanticist." In doing so, [Alan M. Wald] writes, she posed the classic dilemma for writers on the left who wish to avoid "the pitfalls of reductive characterizations and the interpolation of idealized solutions." (127) Petry did not stop writing, though much of her later work was in the form of popular fiction for young adults. But Wald also notes that a subsequent novel, The Narrows (1953), "would be a monumental work that reconfigured the issues of race, gender, and Cold War repression on a new and striking plane." (135)