My students at the University of Edinburgh often ask me, why have Americans been so anti-socialist? Some of them perplexedly refer to the rarity of class conflicts, as, say, Clydesiders would define them, in United States history. They remain unconvinced by ‘class’ or ‘economic’ interpretations of the American past. They underline the paradox by recalling the comparative weakness, in the long term, of organized American socialism. Still, they point out, there has been a good deal of anti-socialist, anti-communist rhetoric across the Atlantic. Is mere any explanation for what, on the face of it, seems to be a ranting in the void?

In any catalogue of famous American families, the Adams name takes second place to none. John and John Quincy Adams were first and second generation Presidents, and in the fourth generation Charles Francis Jr., Brooks, and Henry Adams all gained renown as historians and writers. Upon closer study, however, the story of the Adamses presents us with something more significant than an example of sequential biography; rather, it suggests a fascinating historical and literary problem. For what began as a political dynasty endured three generations later as a family literary society, effectively divorced from the exercise of those powers which had once appeared to be a birthright. A dramatic transition from political leadership to literary notoriety had been completed; and this change symbolized the alteration in Adams family fortunes between 1828 and 1920. Even as it was taking place, moreover, this shift in the nature and character of family activities and attainments puzzled and sometimes tortured those members of the third and fourth generations who felt themselves being made the victims of the change. Brooks Adams, for example, shows his anguished response in ‘The Heritage of Henry Adams’ and Law of Civilization and Decay; and Henry Adams registers his own surprise and cool horror when he contemplates the fate of the Adamses in The Education of Henry Adams.

In May 1932 the Museum of Modern Art opened on 53rd Street in New York in an old mansion. A number of artists associated widi New Masses, the leftist magazine founded in 1925, showed a collection of political murals sharply commenting on die economic imbalance and social cruelty of the times. Hugo Gellert's mural was entided ‘Us fellas gotta stick together’, a phrase drawn from an already notorious conversation between a young member of die wealthy Vanderbilt family, who had obtained a reporting job on a Hearst newspaper, and his equally rich interviewee, Al Capone, then in gaol. Capone, as usual, knew die score and told die young capitalist inheritor: ‘Us fellas gotta stick togedier.‘ Gellert's mural neatly encapsulated the Hearst-gangsterdom axis, since the centre of corruption, then as now, in America was die interlocking of business and crime. Naturally, President Hoover, Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan and J. D. Rockefeller found die exhibition offensive since diey were die ‘fellas’ in die mural with Capone. Another picture, by the great political artist, Ben Shahn, showed figures in the Sacco and Vanzetti case, and one by William Gropper, another fine political artist, showed J. P. Morgan and Andrew Mellon, a couple of notorious millionaires, eating tickertape with two pigs, and protected by militiamen. The Gropper was entitled, with little subdety, but quite accurately, ‘The Writing on the Wall’.

The current nostalgic interest in the 1920s and '30s has brought about more than the revival of period fashion and interior decoration in America. For anyone concerned with die visual arts it has illuminated the most exciting and prolific decade diat country has ever seen. During die Depression the official approach to art and die artist was radically different from anything before or since, and probably from anything in the Western world. That this should have come about is in itself amazing, die more so as it was done through Congressional legislation, supported by the President.

Robert Penn Warren is a writer of extraordinarily diverse talents and interests. He is, among other things, one of the founders of the New Criticism, a poet and a poetic dramatist of national reputation (he won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his nineteen volumes of verse), and a gifted teacher. Above all, though, he is a writer whose moral and philosophical bias is towards the kind of historical specificity and social density which is perhaps the special preserve of the novel. This more than anything else accounts for the exceptional range and volume of his fictional writing and for the usual association of his name with one book in particular which is, by common consent, his finest achievement: All The King's Men, first published in 1946. Occasionally, a case has been made for the superiority of one of his other novels, and there have been one or two attempts to locate the centre of his work in the poetry. But these have been scattered, infrequent, and in the event, I think, unconvincing. All The King's Men remains his masterwork, and perhaps his most characteristic piece of fiction too, so that any assessment of Warren the imaginative writer has ultimately to focus upon it.

Robert Rossen served a decade's apprenticeship as a writer before he turned director in 1947; and he scripted or co-scripted seven of his own ten films. Yet virtually all this writing was adaptation; the only exceptions were a couple of Warner Bros. gangster movies, Marked Woman (1937) and Racket Busters (1938), based on real events, and the historical epic, Alexander the Great (1956), of which the same might be said. Even the projects he did not carry through – The Treasure of Sierra Madre, Billy Budd, Robert Penn Warren's Night Rider – were also adaptations, except his last, unfinished script, Cocoa Beach, which (excepting early stage plays) would have been his first original. Yet, if inconsistent, his impulse to personal creative expression was strong and at times almost overbearing – his place in Andrew Sarris's category of ‘Strained Seriousness’ seems less surprising than some of his company there (Norman Jewison, for instance). So presumably he was able, more often than not, to find and use literary material which expressed or partly predigested what he wanted to say, as in The Hustler (1961), or else the material somehow helped him to discover this, as with Lilith (1964).