ABSTRACT
The growth of Marxism in Britain was one aspect of a major debate between Perry Anderson and E. P. Thompson in 1965-7 concerning recent British history and its political implications. American communism produced its share of 'sociological equivalent' literary criticism in books like Granville Hicks' Great Tradition and V. F. Calverton's Liberation of American Literature. In the immediate post-war period, before the stranglehold of McCarthyism virtually silenced American Marxism for nearly a decade, Sidney Finklestein produced a series of books that laid out with clarity a Marxist aesthetic that was both attentive to the details of American culture and remained congruent with orthodox socialist realism. The watershed in British Marxism since the Second World War was 1956, when the Hungarian revolt detached a large section of Marxist intellectuals from the Communist Party, and from its orthodox theory, in the formation of the 'New Left'.
