Waldo Frank

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Waldo Frank

Waldo David Frank (born August 25, 1889 in Long Branch , New Jersey , † January 9, 1967 in White Plains , New York ) was an American writer and sociologist of Jewish origin. While he failed with narrative prose, as an essayist he anticipated some insights from culture and technology critics such as DH Lawrence , Lewis Mumford and Herbert Marcuse . Once counted among the outstanding intellectuals in North America, he was forgotten after the Second World War. Only in Latin America are his books still read today.

life and work

Frank's parents were wealthy enough to send their unusually intelligent and well-read son to boarding school in Lausanne , Switzerland , after a few years of high school . He graduated from Yale with an MA in 1911 .

He wrote for various magazines, including Seven Art ; from 1925 also for the New Republic and the New Yorker . He made his novel debut in 1917 with The Unwelcome Man , whose “hero” refrains from suicide when he realizes that mentally he is already dead. The first film reveals influences from Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson . Frank's worldview was brewing in a pot made of Sigmund Freud , Karl Marx , Spinoza , Far Eastern mysticism and North American transcendentalism . "He is convinced that many earthly problems would be solved if each individual could find an agreement with the cosmos." To characterize this rather vague rescue plan, Frank, wrote Edward Paynter, explicitly borrowed the term "Unanism" from the French writer Jules Romains .

After he had received little attention with several novels, Frank turned away from fiction around 1925, only to pick it up again in the 1950s, but even then with poor response. In addition to articles, he now wrote studies and travelogues. For Paynter, the narrative failure of an “unanimistic” concept was necessary because the template-like individuals then only acted as vicarious agents for those social or even cosmic beings who, from a non-animistic point of view, made up organic life. The concept may be useful for prophetic poetry; the novelist, however, condemned it to serial production of questionable philosophical robber pistols ("philosophically dubious potboilers "). On the other hand, Frank's essayistic writing could hardly have been affected.

Frank's quite remarkable “histories” consistently revolved around the question of whether America or “the West” was the appropriate stage to get rid of the bad dowry of history. For Frank it was above all about overcoming the deification of the machine and its alienating and otherwise devastating effects. He saw the deafening rhythm of "the machine" itself embodied in baseball and jazz. If he opted for Indians and Negroes, he overlooked the fact that they also liked to dance frenetically. However, his views of the “industrial jungle” were teeming with contradictions, said Paynter. That is hardly surprising in view of the conflicting tendencies that have shaken the author: against the world, fighting with it; away from the world, fleeing to spiritual regions.

Small machines, great fame

Frank's 1926 study of Spanish culture, Virgian Spain , earned him much applause, at least in Latin America.

Around 1930 Frank got to know southern America in person, as a traveler, as well as the Soviet Union, which resulted in corresponding publications. During these years he was increasingly politically active; he took part in various protests and conferences, came to an understanding with prominent colleagues such as Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser , and supported parliamentary candidates for the Communist Party. On another trip to Latin America, during which Frank gave well-attended lectures, he made the mistake of criticizing the Nazi-friendly government course in Argentina, whereupon he was declared an undesirable person. He crowned this trip with the books South America Journey (1943) and Simon Bolivar (1951). Nevertheless, he then bit into fiction again, unsuccessfully. He could not find a publisher for his last two novel manuscripts. When he died in 1967 at the age of 77, Frank was almost forgotten. Since 1952 he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Frank left a son from his first marriage (1916-1924) with Margaret Naumburg and two other children from a second marriage with Alma Magoon (from 1927). He was friends with the writers Jean Toomer and Hart Crane . Paynter described the mystical cultural critic Frank as a humorless, yet extremely selfish and affirmative man who was hungry for fame. It is true that the 70-year-old, looking back on his bitterly disappointing “career”, made a conscientious effort to trace the reasons for his failure; Nevertheless, his memories, which were only published posthumously, are peppered with pathetic self-delusions, quotes from dusty press kits and exaggerated claims of his importance. Until the end, the size of Frank was "the most terrible intoxicant".

Works

  • The Unwelcome Man , novel, 1917
  • Our America , Essays, 1919
  • The Dark Mother , novel, 1920
  • City Block , novel, 1922
  • Rahab , novel, 1922
  • Holiday , Roman, 1923
  • Chalk Face , Roman, 1924
  • Virgin Spain: Scenes from the Spiritual Drama of a Great People , 1926
  • The Re-discovery of America: An Introduction to a philosophy of American Life , 1929
  • America Hispana: A Portrait and a Prospect , 1931
  • Dawn in Russia: The Record of a Journey , 1932
  • The Death and Birth of David Markand , novel, 1934
  • In the American jungle , 1937
  • The bridegroom cometh , 1939
  • South American Journey , 1943, translated into German by Hildegard von Barloewen: South American Journey , Weismann, Munich 1951, DNB 451339398 .
  • The Jew in Our Day , London 1944
  • The invaders , 1948
  • Birth of a World: Simon Bolivar in Terms of his Peoples , 1951,
  • Re-discovery of Man , 1953
  • Bridgehead: The Drama of Israel , 1957
  • The Prophetic Island: A Portrait of Cuba , 1961
  • Memoirs , 1973 posthumously

literature

  • Paul J. Carter: Waldo Frank (= Twayne's United States authors series, Volume 125). Twaine, New York, NY 1967, OCLC 605923231 .
  • Waldo Frank's Crusade for Latin America Literature . In: The Americas 46, July 1, 1989.
  • Casey Nelson Blake: Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford . University Of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2004, ISBN 978-0-8078-6042-7 (Dissertation University Rochester , NY 1987, OCLC 753714444 ).
  • Michael A. Ogorzaly: Waldo Frank: Prophet of Hispanic Regeneration . Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg / Associated University Presses, Cranbury (New Jersey), 1994, ISBN 0-8387-5233-0 (Philosophical Dissertation University of Notre Dame 1983, OCLC 9523795 ).
  • Sebastiaan Faber: Learning from the Latins: Waldo Frank's Progressive Pan-Americanism . In: CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2003, pp. 257-295.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Edward Paynter , accessed July 25, 2011
  2. ↑ a b c University of Delaware , accessed July 25, 2011
  3. ↑ On the other hand, Ernest Hemingway mocked her in Death in the Afternoon (1932), can be read in the English Wikipedia , see WP en , accessed on July 25, 2011.
  4. ^ Frank A. Ninkovich: The diplomacy of ideas: US foreign policy and cultural relations, 1938–1950 . Cambridge University Press, 1981, 44.
  5. ↑ Members: Waldo Frank. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 28, 2019 .
  6. ↑ After his mother's death, a black youth from the country meets a homosexual lawyer on the train to New York. Most of all, they discuss.
  7. ↑ From the contemporary New York scene of freethinking and permissive artists. For Paynters, the "high point" of the (failed) unanimistic novel concept.
  8. Jump up ↑ A Southern Black Lynch Case. The style of the novel is "modern" and "experimental", says the University of Illinois , accessed on July 25, 2011
  9. ^ Contemporary book presentation by Hermann Keyserling (1932), accessed on July 25, 2011
  10. ^ Dawn in Russia
  11. ↑ Paynters sees parallels to Herbert Marcuse's one -dimensional human from 1960
  12. ↑ For Paynters Frank's Most Beautiful Book
personal data
SURNAME Frank, Waldo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Frank, Waldo David (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer and critic
DATE OF BIRTH August 25, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Long Branch, New Jersey
DATE OF DEATH January 9, 1967
Place of death White Plains (New York)