The romance of American Communism / Vivian Gornick.

Chapter one. To begin with --

Chapter two. They came from everywhere: all kinds of beginnings -- The Jewish Marxists: Sarah Gordon, Ben Saltzman, Selma Gardinsky, Joe Preisen, Belle Rothman, Paul Levinson -- The Dos Passos immigrants: Dick Nikowsski -- The American populists: Will Barnes, Blossom Sheed, Jim Holbrook -- Those of the middle kingdom: Mason Goode, Arthur Chessler, Marian Moran, Diana Michaels --

Chapter three. Living it out: From vision to dogma and halfway back -- The ordinariness of daily activity and the revolution around the corner: Sarah Gordon, Selma Gardinsky, Blossom Sheed -- The wholeness of the CP world: Dina Shapiro, Arthur Chessler, Norma Raymond, Eric Lanzetti -- The party unionist: Maggie McConnell -- Ambivalence: beneath the "wholeness" disintegrating conflict: Esther Allen, Mason Goode, Lou Goldstein -- Going into industry: Karl Millens, Maurey Sachman -- The underground: Nettie Posin, Hugh Armstrong, Bill Chaikin -- What we did to each other: Sam Russell, Sophie Chessler, Tim Kelley -- The lure of the disciplined revolutionary party: Larry Dougherty, Ricardo Garcia --

Chapter four. The went back into everywhere: varieties of aftermath -- Politics without the party is unthinkable: Jerome Rindzer, Grace Lange, David Ross -- The anti-communist communist: Max Bitterman -- The wounds of the past: Arnold and Bea Richman -- "I lost more than I got": Morris Silverman, Carl Peters, Dave Abetta -- "Communism was part of the journey": Diane Vinson -- "It was the best life a man could have had!": Anthony Ehrenpreis -- The political emotion embodied: Boris Edel -- "I'll tell you what a communist is": Eric Lanzetti --

Chapter five. To end with.

"For those Americans who chose to become Communists, their discovery of and commitment to the Party was the most stirring, consuming event of their lives, similar in its joys and agonies to the one great, unforgettable and irrevocable romance of a lifetime. Yet until Vivian Gornick's The Romance of American Communism, most of what has been written about these men and women has ignored their flesh and blood humanity to focus exclusively on politics and ideology. It is now time for another, more personal look. It was deeply personal reasons of her own - memories of the family, friends, and neighbors who met nightly around her mother's Bronx kitchen table to debate how to make the revolution - that inspired Vivian Gornick to travel across America to seek out men and women who had been Communists and to ask them to tell her the stories of their lives. Then, of the many she listened to, she chose forty-seven men and women, whose life stories, crafted into unforgettable individual portraits, recreate what may be called the inner history of this American experience. The drama of these lives, the variety, richness, and detail with which Ms. Gornick captures them, brings to mind Dos Passos and Studs Terkel at their best. She begins her book with the questions: "Why, exactly, did people join the Communist Part? Why did they remain? Why did the leave? What were their lives like while they were Communists? What were they like afterward? What did the experience do for them? what did it do to them? In short: what was the emotional and spiritual content of the political vision that shaped thousands of American lives?" for the first time, in this insightful, memorable book, it becomes possible to answer such questions in meaningful, individual human terms, and to more fully understand both these lives and our own recent history." --from dust jacket.

"In The Romance of American Communism, Vivian Gornick writes about the lives of dozens of former members of the Communist Party of the United States. In these biographical pieces, Gornick discusses the political and ideological work of the subjects, as well as their personal lives, in and attempt to flesh out the subjects in a human light. These biographical pieces emerge from the study of the writings and speeches of these figures combined with interviews conducted with the majority of the individuals in the book at the time of writing. The book focuses on how these figures become involved with the Communist Party of the United States, their time spent in the party, and the aftermath effect on their lives. These stories combined with some autobiographical data about Gornick as she explains in the opening and closing chapter her motivation for writing the book and her experience in the process of doing so." -from cataloger.