Max (Forrester) Eastman - Selected works by Max Eastman

Journalist and writer, born in Canandaigua, New York, USA. The editor of two prominent left-wing publications, The Masses (1913–17) and The Liberator (1918–22), he later became a critic of Marxism in his writings, lectures, and broadcasts.

Max Forrester Eastman (January 4, 1883–March 25, 1969) was a socialist American writer and patron of the Harlem Renaissance, later famous as an anti-leftist. Eastman attended Williams College in 1905, two years later moving to Columbia University to work toward a Ph.D. Settling in Greenwich Village with his sister, Crystal Eastman, he became involved in political matters, helping to found the Men's League for Women's Suffrage in 1910.

Eastman had become a key figure in the left-leaning Greenwich Village community, and combined this with his academic experience to explore varying interests including literature, psychology and social reform. Eastman subsequently stood trial twice under provisions of the Sedition Act, but was acquitted both times. In 1924, The Liberator was merged with two other publications to create The Workers Monthly and Eastman quit working for it.

Eastman embarked in 1923 on a fact-finding tour of the Soviet Union in order to get a feel for how the Soviet version of Marxism worked in practice. In later years, however, Eastman's writings on the subject were cited by many on both the left and the right as sober and realistic portrayals of the Soviet system.

Although Eastman's view of the Soviet Union in particular was drastically altered by his experiences there and by subsequent study, his commitment to left-wing political ideas continued unabated. While in the Soviet Union Eastman began a friendship with Leon Trotsky which endured through the latter's exile to Mexico; Eastman translated several of Trotsky's works into English during this time.

During the 1930s Eastman continued writing critiques of contemporary literature, publishing several controversial works in which he criticized James Joyce and other modernist writers, who, he claimed, had fostered "the cult of unintelligibility." Eastman was also an active traveling lecturer on various literary and social topics throughout the 1930s and 1940s.

By 1941 Eastman had largely abandoned his former left-wing beliefs and connections. Eastman's repudiation of socialism in general and communism in particular reached its high water-mark with the publication of Reflections on the Failure of Socialism in 1955.

Selected works by Max Eastman

Enjoyment of Poetry, 1913 Child of the Amazons, 1913 Journalism Versus Art, 1916 Color of Life, 1918 The Sense of Humor, 1921 Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth, 1925 Since Lenin Died, 1925 Marx and Lenin: The Science of Revolution, 1926 The Literary Mind: Its Place in an Age of Science, 1931 Artists in Uniform, 1934 Art and the Life of Action, 1934 Enjoyment of Laughter, 1936 Stalin's Russia and the Crisis in Socialism, 1939 Marxism: Is It a Science?, 1940 Heroes I Have Known, 1942 Enjoyment of Living, 1948 Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, 1955 Great Companions: Critical Memoirs of Some Famous Friends, 1959 Love and Revolution: My Journey Through an Epoch, 1964 Seven Kinds of Goodness, 1967