ABSTRACT
Hicks had left the New Masses (where he had worked for five years) in 1939, the same year he resigned from the Communist Party because he disagreed with the Party's position on the Soviet-German pact. Nevertheless, he continued to believe in socialism. In this review of The Grand Design he reviewed what other critics had written about the novel, and concluded that political bias in reviewing was not ‘a vice peculiar to the left’. Dos Passos, Hicks claimed, having lost his faith in Marxism, had found nothing to replace it with.
