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Paul M. Buhle, A Dreamer's Paradise Lost: Louis C. Fraina/Lewis Corey (1892-1953) and the Decline of Radicalism in the United States (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press 1995).
LOUIS FRAINA (Lewis Corey), one of the most fascinating characters in the history of American radicalism, has long been lurking on the margins of left scholarship, looking for a suitable biographer. He has finally found one in another fascinating and somewhat comparable character on the American left -- Paul Buhle. Drawing on his extensive research files, the Left press, Oral History of the American Left interview transcripts, and Fraina's own papers and publications, Buhle follows Fraina from his impoverished boyhood in New York's Bowery, through his conversion to DeLeonite socialism, his involvement in the cultural Bohemianism of the pre-World War I years, his immersion in Socialist Party factionalism, and his central role in the foundation of American communism, to his career as a radical economist in the 1930s, and beyond to his bitter anti-communism of the Cold War Era. Throughout, Buhle's fluid writing and his efforts to place Fraina in the political and cultural currents of his time render the book vital to students of American radicalism and accessible to interested readers without extensive background.
A Dreamer's Paradise offers particularly penetrating discussion of Fraina's early life, especially the experiential and ideological bases for the radicalism of a brilliant young Italian immigrant, his love affair with Bohemianism, and his ideological evolution toward early Communism. The book's chapter on the second decade of the 20th century which "offered the possibility of simultaneous radical change in economies, politics, morals, and art," (32) contains perhaps our best short discussion of the dynamic between the era's vibrant socialist movement and the modernist aesthetic...