American Studies Commons^™

Granville Hicks And The Small Town, Leah Levenson, Jerry Natterstad

The Courier

This article tells the story of Granville Hicks' life, especially his life during the 1940s, revealed through journals that are now held in Syracuse University's Special Collections. The author was famously a Marxist critic and member of the Communist party during the 1930s, before defecting in 1939 due to the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. He then somewhat retreated from intellectual life to become a member of a small community in Grafton, New York, closer to his rural upbringing. He struggled to try to better the small community in areas of civic institutions and racial prejudice, seeing Grafton as a microcosm of …