Proletarian literature refers to the literature created by working-class

Working class

Working class is a term used in the social sciences and in ordinary conversation to describe those employed in lower tier jobs , often extending to those in unemployment or otherwise possessing below-average incomes...

 writers for the class-conscious proletariat

Proletariat

The proletariat is a term used to identify a lower social class, usually the working class; a member of such a class is proletarian...

, published by the communist parties

Communist party

A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government...

. It was a literature without literary pretensions.

The avantgardist Proletkult

Proletkult

Proletkult was movement which arose in the Russian revolution and was active from 1917 to 1925 which aspired to provide the foundations for what was intended to be a truly proletarian art devoid of bourgeois influence.The name is a portmanteau of "proletarskaya kultura" , which are better-known as...

 of the first years of the Russian revolution, was different from the later, traditional and realist Proletarian novel

Proletarian novel

Proletarian literature was centered on poor, working-class individuals, and was written during the period of 1930 to 1945. The adjective "proletarian" comes from the Latin words "prole , and , and is a term used to identify an individual of a lower social class identity. Often the group is...

 of the Stalin years. It florished in Russia, where many people needed to learn to read and write and was popular with communist

Communism

Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...

 readers in Europe, Japan, China and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. The genre was rediscovered at the end of the 1960s by the maoist

Maoism

Maoism, also known as the Mao Zedong Thought , is claimed by Maoists as an anti-Revisionist form of Marxist communist theory, derived from the teachings of the Chinese political leader Mao Zedong . Developed during the 1950s and 1960s, it was widely applied as the political and military guiding...

wing of the student movement.

In the United States, Mike Gold

Mike Gold

Michael "Mike" Gold is the pen-name of Jewish American writer Itzok Isaac Granich. A lifelong communist, Gold was a novelist and literary critic, his semi-autobiographical novel Jews Without Money from 1930 was a bestseller.- Biography :Gold was born Itzok Isaac Granich on April 12, 1894 on the...

 was the first to promote proletarian literature, in Max Eastman

Max Eastman

Max Forrester Eastman was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society, a poet, and a prominent political activist. For many years, Eastman was a supporter of socialism, a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes...

's magazine The Liberator (magazine)

The Liberator (magazine)

The Liberator was a monthly socialist magazine established by Max Eastman and his sister Crystal Eastman in 1918 to continue the work of The Masses, which was shut down by the wartime mailing regulations of the U.S. government. Intensely political, the magazine included copious quantities of art,...

 and later in The New Masses

The New Masses

The "New Masses" was a prominent American Marxist publication edited by Walt Carmon, briefly by Whittaker Chambers, and primarily by Michael Gold, Granville Hicks, and Joseph Freeman....

. The party newspaper, The Daily Worker also published literature, as did numerous other magazines like The Anvil, edited by Jack Conroy

Jack Conroy

Jack Conroy a leftist American writer, also known as a Worker-Writer, and was best known for his contributions to “proletarian literature,” fiction and nonfiction about the life of American workers during the early decades of the 20th century.-Background:He was born John Wesley Conroy to Irish...

, Blast, and Partisan Review

Partisan Review

Partisan Review was an American political and literary quarterly published from 1934 to 2003, though it suspended publication between October 1936 and December 1937.-Overview:...

.

American examples of the proletarian novels include Mike Gold

Mike Gold

Michael "Mike" Gold is the pen-name of Jewish American writer Itzok Isaac Granich. A lifelong communist, Gold was a novelist and literary critic, his semi-autobiographical novel Jews Without Money from 1930 was a bestseller.- Biography :Gold was born Itzok Isaac Granich on April 12, 1894 on the...

's Jews without Money (1930) and Agnes Smedley

Agnes Smedley

Agnes Smedley was an American journalist and writer best known for her semi-autobiographical novelDaughter of Earth. She was also known for her sympathetic chronicling of the Chinese revolution...

's Daughter of Earth

Daughter of Earth

Daughter of Earth is an autobiographical novel by the American author and journalist Agnes Smedley. The novel chronicles the years of Marie Rogers’s tumultuous childhood, struggles in relationships with men , time working with the Socialist party, and involvement in the Indian independence...

(1929), and Robert Cantwell

Robert Cantwell

Robert Emmett Cantwell was a novelist and critic. His most notable work, The Land of Plenty, focuses on a lumber mill in a thinly disguised version of his hometown of Aberdeen, Washington....

's Land of Plenty (1934). James T. Farrell

James T. Farrell

James Thomas Farrell was an American novelist. One of his most famous works was the Studs Lonigan trilogy, which was made into a film in 1960 and into a television miniseries in 1979...

, Howard Fast

Howard Fast

Howard Melvin Fast was an American novelist and television writer. Fast also wrote under the pen names E. V. Cunningham and Walter Ericson.-Early life:Fast was born in New York City...

, The Last Frontier (1941), Albert Halper

Albert Halper

-Life:Born in 1904 and raised in Chicago, Halper went to live and work in New York City in 1929. His work came to the attention of Elliot E. Cohen, who published him in his magazine, the Menorah Journal...

, Josephine Herbst

Josephine Herbst

Josephine Herbst was an American writer and journalist, active from 1923 to near the time of her death. She was a radical with communist leanings, who "incorporate[d] the philosophy of socialism into her fiction" and "aligned herself with the political Left", She wrote "proletarian novels"...

, Albert Maltz

Albert Maltz

Albert Maltz was an American author and screenwriter. He was one of the Hollywood Ten who were later blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio bosses....

, Tillie Olsen

Tillie Olsen

Tillie Lerner Olsen was an American writer associated with the political turmoil of the 1930s and the first generation of American feminists.-Biography:...

, and Meridel Le Sueur

Meridel Le Sueur

Meridel Le Sueur was an American writer associated with the proletarian movement of the 1930s and 1940s...

 were other well-known proletarian writers.

Literature

Anthologies

• The American Writer's Congress edited by Henry Hart. International Publishers, New York 1935.
• Proletarian Literature in the United States: an Anthology edited by Granville Hicks, Joseph North, Paul Peters, Isidor Schneider and Alan Calmer; with a critical introduction by Joseph Freeman. International Publishers, New York 1935.

Studies

• Aaron, Daniel
  Daniel Aaron (academic)
  Daniel Aaron is an American writer and academic. Aaron helped found the Library of America in 1978.In 1937, Aaron became the first to graduate with a degree in "American Civilization" from Harvard University....
  
  : Writers on the Left. Harcourt, New York 1961.
• Denning, Michael: The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. Verso, 1996.
• Foley, Barbara: Radical Representations. Duke University Press, 1993.
• Murphy, F.: The Proletarian Moment. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Ill 1991.
• Nelson, Cary
  Cary Nelson
  Cary Nelson , professor of English and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is the current president of the American Association of University Professors and a prominent scholar-activist....
  
  : Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left. Routledge, 2001.
• Rabinowitz, Paula: Labor and Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1991.
• Rideout, Walter B. The Radical Novel in the United States: 1900-1954. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1956.
• Steinberg, Mark. Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910-1925. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. (On proletarian literature in late-imperial and early Soviet Russia)
• Wald, Alan M.: Writing from the Left. Verso, 1984.
• Wald, Alan M.: Exiles from a Future Time. University of North Carolina Press, 2002.