Max Eastman

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Max Eastman

Max Forrester Eastman (born January 4, 1883 in Canandaigua , NY , † March 25, 1969 in Bridgetown , Barbados ) was an American writer .

Life

Eastman attended Williams College until 1905 and two years later went to Columbia University , where he worked as an assistant in philosophy and psychology until 1911 . He lived in Greenwich Village with his sister Chrystal Eastman . He helped found the Men's League for Women's Suffrage in 1910 .

Eastman became a key figure in the left wing community of Greenwich Village.

In 1913 he published the study Enjoyment of Poetry . In the same year he became an author for the magazine The Masses , which thematized socialist philosophy and art .

In 1918, The Masses fell under the Espionage Act passed by Congress in 1917 . Eastman himself was charged twice but acquitted both times. He and his sister founded The Liberator magazine in 1919 , which was taken over by the US Communist Party in 1924 after financial problems. Eastman stopped working for the paper after that.

Eastman went on a year-long trip to the Soviet Union in 1923 to see how Marxism would be put into practice. It was there that he saw the beginning of the power struggles that culminated in Stalinism . On his return he wrote several essays criticizing the Soviet Union's system.

Despite this criticism, he stuck to his leftist ideas. In the Soviet Union he had built a friendship with Leon Trotsky . During Trotsky's exile in Mexico , Eastman translated many of his works into English . In 1938 Trotsky Eastman criticized Your Morals and Ours in the work .

During the 1930s he wrote critical works on literary subjects and was responsible for the completion and publication of the documentary From Tsar to Lenin , in which he took on the role of speaker. He was married to Elena Krylenko , the sister of the Soviet People's Commissar for Justice, Nikolai Vasilyevich Krylenko .

In 1941 Eastman abandoned his earlier communist and socialist ideas. He had been employed by Reader's Digest that year and remained in that position for the rest of his life. He wrote critical articles on socialism and communism and actively supported Joseph McCarthy . He later published a number of autobiographical works.

Works

  • 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 , 1965
  • Seven Kinds of Goodness , 1967

literature

Web links

Commons : Max Eastman  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. Leon Trotsky: Your morals and ours. 1938, Retrieved May 6, 2019 .