Harvey Swados
Encyclopedia
Harvey Swados was an American social critic and author of novels, short stories, essays and journalism.
Simultaneous with an upper-middle class upbringing, Swados developed an acute awareness of his social surroundings. During his childhood and early adolescent years in Buffalo during the Great Depression
, he often witnessed his father treating unemployed patients without charging a fee. In 1936, at age 15, Swados enrolled at the University of Michigan
at Ann Arbor, where he won a Hopwood Award
for creative writing.
"His career really began with the publication, in Contemporary, the literary quarterly at the University of Michigan, of a short story, 'The Amateurs.' Written when Swados was just 16, 'The Amateurs' was reprinted in The Best Short Stories of 1938, where it appeared alongside stories by Robert Penn Warren
, John Steinbeck
, Eudora Welty
, John Cheever
and Mark Schorer
."
Strongly influenced by the political and social convictions of his sister Felice, and while still an undergraduate, Swados also initiated during this period what was to become a lengthy relationship with the anti-Stalinist American Left and, by the late 1930s, had affiliated himself with the Leon Trotsky
–inspired and Max Shachtman
–led Workers Party (U.S.), whose adherents included novelist James T. Farrell
and democratic socialist theorist, literary critic and social historian Irving Howe
.
Following his university graduation in 1940, Swados returned to Buffalo, where he worked as a riveter at defense contractor Bell Aircraft
, passed through a brief first marriage and, following his sister, moved to New York City, where he took another factory job at the bustling Brewster Aviation
plant in Long Island City, just across the East River from Manhattan. A graduate of Smith College
in Northampton, Massachusetts, Felice had married American historian Richard Hofstadter
in 1936 and was working as an editor at Time
magazine. House of Fury, a novel by Felice Swados, was published in 1941.
Though he had already begun distancing himself from the Trotskyist organization by the beginning of the 1940s, Swados remained committed to principles of democratic socialism—exclusive of any party structure—and thought of himself as an independent radical for the rest of his life. "Despite his own drift away from the revolutionary expectations of his youth, much that would remain central to Swados's worldview was formed in these politically charged years of factory employment in the early 1940s." Experiences and friendships with the political group's adherents "he would later describe in Standing Fast, his 1970 novel that sympathetically recorded the exhilaration and despair of his political generation as it moved from the radical hopes of the late 1930s to a kind of acquiescent liberalism in the 1950s and 1960s."
in 1943. "His wartime service took him to the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the North Atlantic, the South Pacific and to various ports of call on five continents." Those peripatetic experiences formed the basis for his first novel, The Unknown Constellations. Dissatisfied with its reception among friends and colleagues whose opinions he valued, and unable to place it with a publisher at that time, Swados set the work aside shortly after its creation in the 1940s. Its posthumous publication by the University of Illinois Press
in 1995 served as a revelation into the concerns and social issues that were later to engage him throughout his working life.
After giving birth to her son Dan in 1943, Felice lost her life to cancer in 1945 at age 29. Apart from the profound impact her death had on him, Swados, driven by his deep love for Felice and for her idealism, was more than ever determined to make his way as a writer.
In 1946, as he continued to launch his writing career, Swados married Bette Beller, with whom he had three children—son Marco in 1947, daughter Felice in 1949, who was named after Swados's late sister, and son Robin
in 1953. During this period, Swados worked in several public relations jobs often having to do with fundraising initiatives on behalf of the nascent State of Israel
. He found the office work frustrating, though, drawing as it did on many of the working hours and on many of the skills Swados wished to apply toward his own writing.
By the early 1950s, Swados and his family had moved from Brooklyn Heights to Greenwich Village in Manhattan, finally buying a home in then-rural Rockland County, New York, 25 miles north of New York City. On the commuter train between Rockland and Weehawken, New Jersey, on his way to and from his midtown Manhattan office job, Swados often did his own work, assembling his thoughts and writing his first published novel, Out Went the Candle, which was released in 1955.
professor C. Wright Mills
, whom Swados had met through Richard Hofstadter
. Mills and Swados not only worked side by side on construction projects at one another's homes, but critiqued—sometimes passionately—one another's works in progress. Multi-hour discussions on politics and contemporary American culture characterized their relationship; the two frequently disagreed politically, most notably on the nature of the Castro revolution
in Cuba. Their mutual friend, writer Dan Wakefield
, observed that Swados's short stories "dramatized concerns such as Mills addressed in White Collar
, like the threat to individual freedom from new technology and corporate conformity. . . . More than any other writer I knew, C. Wright Mills's friend and neighbor Harvey Swados embodied the search to live and do his work in a commercial world and maintain his commitment as an artist."
Beginning in the late 1950s, in addition to his literary and journalistic work, Swados began teaching at Sarah Lawrence College
in Bronxville, New York, where writer Grace Paley
was among his colleagues.
The family's residency in Rockland was punctuated by sojourns to the South of France and the Midwest and West Coast of the United States. Through the generosity of Rockland County friends who owned a modest villa there, Swados and his family resided, from 1955 to 1956, in the medieval Cote D'Azur village of Cagnes-sur-Mer
, midway between Cannes and Nice. The semitropical setting became a much-loved second home to Swados—one to which he and his family returned for three one-year periods between the mid-1950s and the late 1960s. Returning to Rockland County from France in 1956, and unwilling to return to his marketing and public relations paychecks, Swados opted for a job at the newly-constructed Ford Motor Company
assembly plant in Mahwah, New Jersey. His experiences there formed the basis of his 1957 book of related short stories, On the Line.
In his introduction to the University of Illinois Press edition of On the Line, Nelson Lichtenstein
wrote, "When Swados showed up at the Mahwah plant in February 1956, the personnel man was glad to see that he had had some blue collar work experience, but he also found his job application strangely full of blank spots. When asked what he had been doing, Swados dodged: 'Writing novels in the South of France.' This little joke seemed to satisfy, so he was promptly assigned to the assembly line as a metal finisher, the same job he had mastered in the early 1940s when working in Buffalo." Several years later, Lichtenstein wrote, Swados recounted his thoughts about having returned to the factory floor, rather than to an office, to earn a living. Before a U.S. Department of Labor seminar on Manpower Policy and Program, Swados commented, "Good Lord, here they are! I have forgotten all about them. They have been here all these years, making all of these things, and here I am with them, but now I know what it is all about." As he worked a night shift at Ford, Swados also spent days working on On the Line. In an enthusiastic letter to his friends Stuart and Barbara Schulberg, whom Swados and his wife had met in Cagnes-sur-Mer, he wrote, "I think when [the stories] are all done they will give an inkling of what has happened to the American dream. Even their titles are good!"
In 1957, Swados and his family decamped for a year to Iowa City, Iowa, where Swados was a faculty member at Paul Engle
's Iowa Writers' Workshop
, and where his colleagues included Vance Bourjaily
and Herbert Gold
. Several years later, beginning in 1960, Swados and his family spent a year in San Francisco, when he accepted an appointment to join the English faculty at San Francisco State University
. There, his English Department colleagues included S. I. Hayakawa
, who several years later was to become the university's controversial president.
In Rockland and elsewhere, while Swados's work on his novels and short stories formed the core of his creative life during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he and his wife also spent many months abroad—in the Middle East, in Africa and in Central Europe—where Swados developed and filed stories, reviews and articles for publications ranging from The New Leader
and Dissent
to Esquire
; from The Nation
and New Politics
to Playboy
and The New York Times
.
As examples of Swados's voluminous journalism, two pieces written for The New York Times Sunday Magazine in many ways typify his wide-ranging social curiosity. In an article published on November 13, 1966, "When Black and White Live Together," Swados presented the integrated community of Rochdale Village
, in the New York City borough of Queens, as a paradigm of American brotherhood, idealism and economic self-interest. (Although the Rochdale example was short-lived, its history has been documented by former resident, author and editor Peter Eisenstadt.) In an article published on April 23, 1967, Swados profiled the maverick and unpredictable CBS News executive Fred Friendly.
In 1967, reporting on the Nigerian Civil War
as a member of a delegation of American civilians, he visited the secessionist state of Biafra
. There, he met and formed a lasting friendship with the writer Chinua Achebe
, who later was to become Swados's colleague at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
. That same year, Swados also reported from Jerusalem for The New York Times on the aftermath of the Six-Day War
. In 1968, as a private citizen, he visited Czechoslovakia
, with Bette and Robin, to familiarize himself with individuals who had participated in the political liberalization of the Prague Spring
. Swados feared for his family's safety, though. He was strongly urged by members of the reformist Alexander Dubcek
government to depart the country, which the family was indeed forced to do, mere hours before the arrival of invading Russian troops.
. In what was to be one of the final public acts of his political life, Swados traveled to Washington, D.C. in 1972 and volunteered his writing services to the presidential campaign of George McGovern
and his running mate Sargent Shriver
. Swados was putting the finishing touches on his final published work, the novel Celebration, when he was stricken by a cerebral aneurysm. His death occurred on December 11, 1972.
At the University of Massachusetts opening celebration in 1979, on the occasion of the deposit of the Harvey Swados papers in the university archives, Irving Howe
said of his late colleague, "He is a writer free of public postures, indifferent to literary fads and totally devoted to perfection of his craft."
And in a later memorial tribute, Swados's friend, critic Hilton Kramer
, lauded Swados's "attention to all those aspects of our history and our feelings that our stylish literature, then in the high tide of its so-called radical phase, had either conveniently forgotten or never knew."
In her preface to the New York Review of Books edition of Nights In The Gardens Of Brooklyn, Swados's friend and former Sarah Lawrence College office neighbor Grace Paley
wrote, "Harvey was interested in good or almost good women and men more than most writers—and readers. By good people I don't mean saints or angels, but people who, for all their complexity, want to do the right thing. Luckily he was unsentimental. He had too much integrity to allow for the soft lies of sentiment. At some point in the stories in this collection the world is going to pick up his characters and drop them down. Their innocence—and ours—is going to take a beating."
Short story collections
Essays
Edited works
Children's literature/Translations
Biography
Family and Early Life
Born in Buffalo, New York, Harvey Swados was the son of Aaron Meyer Swados, a physician, and Rebecca (Bluestone) Swados, a musician and artist whose father was a pioneer Zionist. Both parents' backgrounds were European Jewish. Almost uniformly, uncles, aunts and cousins on both sides of his family were degreed professionals—doctors, dentists, lawyers—but Swados aspired from an early age to a writer's life.Simultaneous with an upper-middle class upbringing, Swados developed an acute awareness of his social surroundings. During his childhood and early adolescent years in Buffalo during the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
, he often witnessed his father treating unemployed patients without charging a fee. In 1936, at age 15, Swados enrolled at the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
at Ann Arbor, where he won a Hopwood Award
Hopwood Award
The Hopwood Awards are a major scholarship program at the University of Michigan, founded by Avery Hopwood.Under the terms of the will of Avery Hopwood, a prominent American dramatist and member of the Class of 1905 of The University of Michigan, one-fifth of Mr. Hopwood's estate was given to the...
for creative writing.
"His career really began with the publication, in Contemporary, the literary quarterly at the University of Michigan, of a short story, 'The Amateurs.' Written when Swados was just 16, 'The Amateurs' was reprinted in The Best Short Stories of 1938, where it appeared alongside stories by Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935...
, John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden and the novella Of Mice and Men...
, Eudora Welty
Eudora Welty
Eudora Alice Welty was an American author of short stories and novels about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards. She was the first living author to have her works published...
, John Cheever
John Cheever
John William Cheever was an American novelist and short story writer. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs." His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Westchester suburbs, old New England villages based on various South Shore towns around Quincy,...
and Mark Schorer
Mark Schorer
Mark Schorer was an American writer, critic, and scholar born in Sauk City, Wisconsin.-Biography:Schorer earned an MA at Harvard and his Ph.D. in English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1936...
."
Strongly influenced by the political and social convictions of his sister Felice, and while still an undergraduate, Swados also initiated during this period what was to become a lengthy relationship with the anti-Stalinist American Left and, by the late 1930s, had affiliated himself with the Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
–inspired and Max Shachtman
Max Shachtman
Max Shachtman was an American Marxist theorist. He evolved from being an associate of Leon Trotsky to a social democrat and mentor of senior assistants to AFL-CIO President George Meany.-Beginnings:...
–led Workers Party (U.S.), whose adherents included novelist James T. Farrell
James T. Farrell
James Thomas Farrell was an American novelist. One of his most famous works was the Studs Lonigan trilogy, which was made into a film in 1960 and into a television miniseries in 1979...
and democratic socialist theorist, literary critic and social historian Irving Howe
Irving Howe
Irving Howe was an American literary and social critic and a prominent figure of the Democratic Socialists of America.-Life and career:...
.
Following his university graduation in 1940, Swados returned to Buffalo, where he worked as a riveter at defense contractor Bell Aircraft
Bell Aircraft
The Bell Aircraft Corporation was an aircraft manufacturer of the United States, a builder of several types of fighter aircraft for World War II but most famous for the Bell X-1, the first supersonic aircraft, and for the development and production of many important civilian and military helicopters...
, passed through a brief first marriage and, following his sister, moved to New York City, where he took another factory job at the bustling Brewster Aviation
Brewster Aeronautical Corporation
The Brewster Aeronautical Corporation was a North American defense contractor that operated from the 1930s until the end of World War II.It started existence as an aircraft division of Brewster & Co., a company that originally sold carriages and had branched into automobile bodies and airplane parts...
plant in Long Island City, just across the East River from Manhattan. A graduate of Smith College
Smith College
Smith College is a private, independent women's liberal arts college located in Northampton, Massachusetts. It is the largest member of the Seven Sisters...
in Northampton, Massachusetts, Felice had married American historian Richard Hofstadter
Richard Hofstadter
Richard Hofstadter was an American public intellectual of the 1950s, a historian and DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University...
in 1936 and was working as an editor at Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine. House of Fury, a novel by Felice Swados, was published in 1941.
Though he had already begun distancing himself from the Trotskyist organization by the beginning of the 1940s, Swados remained committed to principles of democratic socialism—exclusive of any party structure—and thought of himself as an independent radical for the rest of his life. "Despite his own drift away from the revolutionary expectations of his youth, much that would remain central to Swados's worldview was formed in these politically charged years of factory employment in the early 1940s." Experiences and friendships with the political group's adherents "he would later describe in Standing Fast, his 1970 novel that sympathetically recorded the exhilaration and despair of his political generation as it moved from the radical hopes of the late 1930s to a kind of acquiescent liberalism in the 1950s and 1960s."
World War II and After
Serving as a radio operator, Swados joined the United States Merchant MarineUnited States Merchant Marine
The United States Merchant Marine refers to the fleet of U.S. civilian-owned merchant vessels, operated by either the government or the private sector, that engage in commerce or transportation of goods and services in and out of the navigable waters of the United States. The Merchant Marine is...
in 1943. "His wartime service took him to the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the North Atlantic, the South Pacific and to various ports of call on five continents." Those peripatetic experiences formed the basis for his first novel, The Unknown Constellations. Dissatisfied with its reception among friends and colleagues whose opinions he valued, and unable to place it with a publisher at that time, Swados set the work aside shortly after its creation in the 1940s. Its posthumous publication by the University of Illinois Press
University of Illinois Press
The University of Illinois Press , is a major American university press and part of the University of Illinois system. Founded in 1918, the press publishes some 120 new books each year, plus 33 scholarly journals, and several electronic projects...
in 1995 served as a revelation into the concerns and social issues that were later to engage him throughout his working life.
After giving birth to her son Dan in 1943, Felice lost her life to cancer in 1945 at age 29. Apart from the profound impact her death had on him, Swados, driven by his deep love for Felice and for her idealism, was more than ever determined to make his way as a writer.
In 1946, as he continued to launch his writing career, Swados married Bette Beller, with whom he had three children—son Marco in 1947, daughter Felice in 1949, who was named after Swados's late sister, and son Robin
Robin Swados
A Quiet End is a 1985 play by Robin Swados . Is was one of the earliest dramas to deal with the AIDS crisis in the United States. The play premiered as the inaugural production of the International City Theater in Long Beach, California, and then four weeks later at the Offstage Theater in London...
in 1953. During this period, Swados worked in several public relations jobs often having to do with fundraising initiatives on behalf of the nascent State of Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
. He found the office work frustrating, though, drawing as it did on many of the working hours and on many of the skills Swados wished to apply toward his own writing.
By the early 1950s, Swados and his family had moved from Brooklyn Heights to Greenwich Village in Manhattan, finally buying a home in then-rural Rockland County, New York, 25 miles north of New York City. On the commuter train between Rockland and Weehawken, New Jersey, on his way to and from his midtown Manhattan office job, Swados often did his own work, assembling his thoughts and writing his first published novel, Out Went the Candle, which was released in 1955.
From the 1950s to the 1970s
Beginning in the mid-1950s, Swados's Rockland County life with Bette and his children was marked by renewed and burgeoning friendships with fellow residents from the arts and the professions. Perhaps the most profound of Swados's personal and professional relationships, though, was with his West Nyack, New York, neighbor, the sociologist, writer and Columbia UniversityColumbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
professor C. Wright Mills
C. Wright Mills
Charles Wright Mills was an American sociologist. Mills is best remembered for his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination in which he lays out a view of the proper relationship between biography and history, theory and method in sociological scholarship...
, whom Swados had met through Richard Hofstadter
Richard Hofstadter
Richard Hofstadter was an American public intellectual of the 1950s, a historian and DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University...
. Mills and Swados not only worked side by side on construction projects at one another's homes, but critiqued—sometimes passionately—one another's works in progress. Multi-hour discussions on politics and contemporary American culture characterized their relationship; the two frequently disagreed politically, most notably on the nature of the Castro revolution
Cuban Revolution
The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement against the regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista between 1953 and 1959. Batista was finally ousted on 1 January 1959, and was replaced by a revolutionary government led by Castro...
in Cuba. Their mutual friend, writer Dan Wakefield
Dan Wakefield
Dan Wakefield is an American novelist, journalist and screenwriter. His best-selling novels, Going All the Way and Starting Over were made into feature films...
, observed that Swados's short stories "dramatized concerns such as Mills addressed in White Collar
White Collar: The American Middle Classes
White Collar: The American Middle Classes is a study of the American middle class by sociologist C. Wright Mills, first published in 1951. It describes the forming of a "new class": the white-collar workers. It is also a major study of social alienation in the modern industrialized world and...
, like the threat to individual freedom from new technology and corporate conformity. . . . More than any other writer I knew, C. Wright Mills's friend and neighbor Harvey Swados embodied the search to live and do his work in a commercial world and maintain his commitment as an artist."
Beginning in the late 1950s, in addition to his literary and journalistic work, Swados began teaching at Sarah Lawrence College
Sarah Lawrence College
Sarah Lawrence College is a private liberal arts college in the United States, and a leader in progressive education since its founding in 1926. Located just 30 minutes north of Midtown Manhattan in southern Westchester County, New York, in the city of Yonkers, this coeducational college offers...
in Bronxville, New York, where writer Grace Paley
Grace Paley
Grace Paley was an American-Jewish short story writer, poet, and political activist.-Biography:Grace Paley was born in the Bronx to Isaac and Manya Ridnyik Goodside, who anglicized the family name from Gutseit on immigrating from Ukraine. Her father was a doctor. The family spoke Russian and...
was among his colleagues.
The family's residency in Rockland was punctuated by sojourns to the South of France and the Midwest and West Coast of the United States. Through the generosity of Rockland County friends who owned a modest villa there, Swados and his family resided, from 1955 to 1956, in the medieval Cote D'Azur village of Cagnes-sur-Mer
Cagnes-sur-Mer
Cagnes-sur-Mer is a commune of the Alpes-Maritimes department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region in southeastern France.-Geography:It is the largest suburb of the city of Nice and lies to the west-southwest of it, about from the center.-History:...
, midway between Cannes and Nice. The semitropical setting became a much-loved second home to Swados—one to which he and his family returned for three one-year periods between the mid-1950s and the late 1960s. Returning to Rockland County from France in 1956, and unwilling to return to his marketing and public relations paychecks, Swados opted for a job at the newly-constructed Ford Motor Company
Ford Motor Company
Ford Motor Company is an American multinational automaker based in Dearborn, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. The automaker was founded by Henry Ford and incorporated on June 16, 1903. In addition to the Ford and Lincoln brands, Ford also owns a small stake in Mazda in Japan and Aston Martin in the UK...
assembly plant in Mahwah, New Jersey. His experiences there formed the basis of his 1957 book of related short stories, On the Line.
In his introduction to the University of Illinois Press edition of On the Line, Nelson Lichtenstein
Nelson Lichtenstein
Nelson Lichtenstein is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy...
wrote, "When Swados showed up at the Mahwah plant in February 1956, the personnel man was glad to see that he had had some blue collar work experience, but he also found his job application strangely full of blank spots. When asked what he had been doing, Swados dodged: 'Writing novels in the South of France.' This little joke seemed to satisfy, so he was promptly assigned to the assembly line as a metal finisher, the same job he had mastered in the early 1940s when working in Buffalo." Several years later, Lichtenstein wrote, Swados recounted his thoughts about having returned to the factory floor, rather than to an office, to earn a living. Before a U.S. Department of Labor seminar on Manpower Policy and Program, Swados commented, "Good Lord, here they are! I have forgotten all about them. They have been here all these years, making all of these things, and here I am with them, but now I know what it is all about." As he worked a night shift at Ford, Swados also spent days working on On the Line. In an enthusiastic letter to his friends Stuart and Barbara Schulberg, whom Swados and his wife had met in Cagnes-sur-Mer, he wrote, "I think when [the stories] are all done they will give an inkling of what has happened to the American dream. Even their titles are good!"
In 1957, Swados and his family decamped for a year to Iowa City, Iowa, where Swados was a faculty member at Paul Engle
Paul Engle
Paul Engle , noted American poet, editor, teacher, literary critic, novelist, and playwright. He is perhaps best remembered as the long-time director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and as founder of the International Writing Program , both at the University of Iowa.-Life:Engle is often mistakenly...
's Iowa Writers' Workshop
Iowa Writers' Workshop
The Program in Creative Writing, more commonly known as the Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa, is a highly regarded graduate-level creative writing program in the United States...
, and where his colleagues included Vance Bourjaily
Vance Bourjaily
Vance Bourjaily was an American writer, novelist, playwright, journalist, and essayist.-Life:Bourjaily was born in Cleveland, Ohio to Monte Ferris Bourjaily, a Lebanese immigrant who was a journalist and later became editor of the United Features Syndicate, and Barbara Webb, an American-born...
and Herbert Gold
Herbert Gold
-Early life:Gold was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and raised in Lakewood, a community he was later to memorialize in his first book, Birth of a Hero, published in 1951 by Viking Press. He moved to New York City at age 17 after several of his poems had been accepted by New York literary magazines...
. Several years later, beginning in 1960, Swados and his family spent a year in San Francisco, when he accepted an appointment to join the English faculty at San Francisco State University
San Francisco State University
San Francisco State University is a public university located in San Francisco, California. As part of the 23-campus California State University system, the university offers over 100 areas of study from nine academic colleges...
. There, his English Department colleagues included S. I. Hayakawa
S. I. Hayakawa
Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa was a Canadian-born American academic and political figure of Japanese ancestry. He was an English professor, and served as president of San Francisco State University and then as United States Senator from California from 1977 to 1983...
, who several years later was to become the university's controversial president.
In Rockland and elsewhere, while Swados's work on his novels and short stories formed the core of his creative life during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he and his wife also spent many months abroad—in the Middle East, in Africa and in Central Europe—where Swados developed and filed stories, reviews and articles for publications ranging from The New Leader
The New Leader
The New Leader was a political and cultural magazine begun in 1924 by a group of figures associated with the Socialist Party of America, including Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas, and published in New York by the American Labor Conference on International Affairs. Its orientation is liberal and...
and Dissent
Dissent (magazine)
Dissent is a quarterly magazine focusing on politics and culture edited by Michael Walzer and Michael Kazin. The magazine is published for the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc by the University of Pennsylvania Press....
to Esquire
Esquire (magazine)
Esquire is a men's magazine, published in the U.S. by the Hearst Corporation. Founded in 1932, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich.-History:...
; from The Nation
The Nation
The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865, It is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City.The Nation...
and New Politics
New Politics (magazine)
New Politics is an independent socialist journal founded in 1961 and still published in the United States today. While it is inclusive of articles from a variety of left-of-center positions, the publication leans strongly toward a Third camp, democratic Marxist perspective, placing it typically to...
to Playboy
Playboy
Playboy is an American men's magazine that features photographs of nude women as well as journalism and fiction. It was founded in Chicago in 1953 by Hugh Hefner and his associates, and funded in part by a $1,000 loan from Hefner's mother. The magazine has grown into Playboy Enterprises, Inc., with...
and The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
.
As examples of Swados's voluminous journalism, two pieces written for The New York Times Sunday Magazine in many ways typify his wide-ranging social curiosity. In an article published on November 13, 1966, "When Black and White Live Together," Swados presented the integrated community of Rochdale Village
Rochdale, Queens
Rochdale is a neighborhood in the southeastern corner of the borough of Queens in New York City. Located in Community Board 12, Rochdale, along with other neighborhood areas are grouped as part of Greater Jamaica, corresponding to the former Town of Jamaica...
, in the New York City borough of Queens, as a paradigm of American brotherhood, idealism and economic self-interest. (Although the Rochdale example was short-lived, its history has been documented by former resident, author and editor Peter Eisenstadt.) In an article published on April 23, 1967, Swados profiled the maverick and unpredictable CBS News executive Fred Friendly.
In 1967, reporting on the Nigerian Civil War
Nigerian Civil War
The Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Nigerian-Biafran War, 6 July 1967–15 January 1970, was a political conflict caused by the attempted secession of the southeastern provinces of Nigeria as the self-proclaimed Republic of Biafra...
as a member of a delegation of American civilians, he visited the secessionist state of Biafra
Biafra
Biafra, officially the Republic of Biafra, was a secessionist state in south-eastern Nigeria that existed from 30 May 1967 to 15 January 1970, taking its name from the Bight of Biafra . The inhabitants were mostly the Igbo people who led the secession due to economic, ethnic, cultural and religious...
. There, he met and formed a lasting friendship with the writer Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe
Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe popularly known as Chinua Achebe is a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic...
, who later was to become Swados's colleague at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
University of Massachusetts Amherst
The University of Massachusetts Amherst is a public research and land-grant university in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States and the flagship of the University of Massachusetts system...
. That same year, Swados also reported from Jerusalem for The New York Times on the aftermath of the Six-Day War
Six-Day War
The Six-Day War , also known as the June War, 1967 Arab-Israeli War, or Third Arab-Israeli War, was fought between June 5 and 10, 1967, by Israel and the neighboring states of Egypt , Jordan, and Syria...
. In 1968, as a private citizen, he visited Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
, with Bette and Robin, to familiarize himself with individuals who had participated in the political liberalization of the Prague Spring
Prague Spring
The Prague Spring was a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after World War II...
. Swados feared for his family's safety, though. He was strongly urged by members of the reformist Alexander Dubcek
Alexander Dubcek
Alexander Dubček , also known as Dikita, was a Slovak politician and briefly leader of Czechoslovakia , famous for his attempt to reform the communist regime during the Prague Spring...
government to depart the country, which the family was indeed forced to do, mere hours before the arrival of invading Russian troops.
Final Years and Summary
In 1970, Swados and his wife left Rockland County behind, buying an old Colonial home in the village of Chesterfield, Massachusetts. He had decided to accept an appointment as Professor in the Department of English at the University of MassachusettsUniversity of Massachusetts
This article relates to the statewide university system. For the flagship campus often referred to as "UMass", see University of Massachusetts Amherst...
. In what was to be one of the final public acts of his political life, Swados traveled to Washington, D.C. in 1972 and volunteered his writing services to the presidential campaign of George McGovern
George McGovern
George Stanley McGovern is an historian, author, and former U.S. Representative, U.S. Senator, and the Democratic Party nominee in the 1972 presidential election....
and his running mate Sargent Shriver
Sargent Shriver
Robert Sargent Shriver, Jr., known as Sargent Shriver, R. Sargent Shriver, or, from childhood, Sarge, was an American statesman and activist. As the husband of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, he was part of the Kennedy family, serving in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations...
. Swados was putting the finishing touches on his final published work, the novel Celebration, when he was stricken by a cerebral aneurysm. His death occurred on December 11, 1972.
At the University of Massachusetts opening celebration in 1979, on the occasion of the deposit of the Harvey Swados papers in the university archives, Irving Howe
Irving Howe
Irving Howe was an American literary and social critic and a prominent figure of the Democratic Socialists of America.-Life and career:...
said of his late colleague, "He is a writer free of public postures, indifferent to literary fads and totally devoted to perfection of his craft."
And in a later memorial tribute, Swados's friend, critic Hilton Kramer
Hilton Kramer
Hilton Kramer is a U.S. art critic and cultural commentator.Kramer was educated at Syracuse University, Columbia University, Harvard University, Indiana University and the New School for Social Research. He worked as the editor of Arts Magazine, art critic for The Nation, and from 1965 to 1982,...
, lauded Swados's "attention to all those aspects of our history and our feelings that our stylish literature, then in the high tide of its so-called radical phase, had either conveniently forgotten or never knew."
In her preface to the New York Review of Books edition of Nights In The Gardens Of Brooklyn, Swados's friend and former Sarah Lawrence College office neighbor Grace Paley
Grace Paley
Grace Paley was an American-Jewish short story writer, poet, and political activist.-Biography:Grace Paley was born in the Bronx to Isaac and Manya Ridnyik Goodside, who anglicized the family name from Gutseit on immigrating from Ukraine. Her father was a doctor. The family spoke Russian and...
wrote, "Harvey was interested in good or almost good women and men more than most writers—and readers. By good people I don't mean saints or angels, but people who, for all their complexity, want to do the right thing. Luckily he was unsentimental. He had too much integrity to allow for the soft lies of sentiment. At some point in the stories in this collection the world is going to pick up his characters and drop them down. Their innocence—and ours—is going to take a beating."
Published Works
Novels- Out Went the Candle (New York: Viking, 1955)
- False Coin (Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1959)
- The Will (Cleveland: World, 1963)
- Standing Fast (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970)
- Celebration (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975)
- The Unknown Constellations (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995)
Short story collections
- On the Line (Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1957)
- Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn (Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1960)
- A Story for Teddy and Others (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965)
- Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn: The Collected Stories of Harvey Swados. Introduction by Robin Swados. (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986)
Essays
- A Radical’s America (Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1962)
- A Radical at Large: American Essays (London: Hart-Davis, 1968).
Edited works
- Years of Conscience: The Muckrakers (Cleveland: Meridian, 1962)
- The American Writer and the Great Depression (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966)
Children's literature/Translations
- Agouhanna, by Claude Aubry. Translated from the French by Harvey Swados. Illustrated by Grey Cohoe. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971)
- Bim, The Little Donkey, by Albert Lamorisse. Translated from the French by Harvey and Bette Swados (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971)
- The Mystery of the Spanish Silver Mine (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971)
Biography
- Standing Up for the People: The Life and Work of Estes Kefauver (New York: Dutton, 1972)