ABSTRACT

Concurrent with the Progressive and Socialist political movements of the early twentieth century, adventure and reform impulses in fiction of down­ ward class movement commingled in muckraking novels, radical socialist lit­ erature, and ground-breaking drama of politically oriented writers Ernest Poole, Max Eastman, Upton Sinclair and Eugene O’Neill. Here vital contact reached its apex as a compelling social theory and experimental literary form; here actual and fictional attempts at genuine shared experience of economic exploitation between the classes gained significantly in ardor and urgency. Because the viability of seemingly immanent collectivist revolution depended upon class cooperation, the processes of downward social inter­ vention became for American socialists in the 191 Os an ongoing obsession, and the literary text became a locus for the determined working out of theo­ retical issues of cross-class unification.