The Politics of Literature

My last major assignment for the “Reconstruction to the Present” volume of The Broadview Anthology of American Literature (scheduled for publication in the spring of 2027) has been to draft a 30,000-word overview of America and American literature from 1950 to the present. It struck me the other day that one section of my draft—on the politics of literature since 1950—might be of interest more broadly. The examples cited in the draft are of course all American, but the topics discussed include several that over the past few decades have been live issues throughout much of the world—and that remain so today.

There are a number of interesting parallels between today’s literary politics in the United States and those of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Then, as now, right-wing politicians were railing against a range of books that they argued should be removed from libraries and taken off school curricula. In some cases, there were actual book burnings. In the 1950s, though, the focus was on books that promoted ideals of economic egalitarianism—“Communist” ideals, in the view of McCarthyite right-wingers. A report in the 13 November 1953 issue of the St Louis Post Dispatch makes the hard-line right-wingers’ aims abundantly clear:

Mrs. Thomas J. White of Indianapolis, Republican member of Indiana’s Textbook Commission, said the Robin Hood legend, and all information about the Quaker religion should be removed from schoolbooks because they tend to support Communism. … “There is a Communist directive in education now to stress the story of Robin Hood… because he robbed from the rich and gave it to the poor. That’s the Communist line.”

In the twenty-first century too, hard-line right-wingers are in a number of states removing books from libraries and school curricula. Their emphasis, though, is not on tales of Robin Hood or histories of Quaker egalitarianism, but rather on books dealing in a positive way with issues of sexual orientation and gender identity, and on books that deal with subjects such as slavery in America or America’s treatment of Native Americans—books, in other words, that show America not living up to American ideals of fairness and equality. (Among the 300 books removed from the shelves of Florida’s school libraries in 2022 were Sherman Alexie’s National Book Award-winning The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and The Bluest Eye, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queen, and David Levithan’s Two Boys Kissing.)

Another difference is that the twenty-first-century movement targets not just libraries and public school curricula, but also books assigned as university course texts. (Texas A&M University Philosophy instructor Martin Peterson, for example, was ordered in January 2026 to remove the excerpts he had chosen from Plato’s Symposium from the syllabus of his Contemporary Moral Issues course, so as to make the course compliant with state policy on classroom discussions on gender and sexual orientation.)

One more difference between right wingers then and right wingers now deserves mention. In the 2020s the Republican administration has made light of the actions of state governments’ restrictions on books: school districts were doing no more than establishing “commonsense processes by which to evaluate and remove age-inappropriate materials,” Trump’s Education Department declared. In contrast, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, then President, spoke out loud and clear when he addressed a 1953 university student audience at Dartmouth College: “Don't join the book burners,” he urged. “Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book.”

So much for the biases of the hard right in the early 1950s and in our own day. What of those on the left?

In the early 1950s, a number of leading writers (among them Langston Hughes, Arthur Miller, and Richard Wright) were branded as Communist sympathizers by McCarthy and his followers, and the publishing community as a whole was branded as left-wing. In their wild accusations regarding Communist Party memberships, McCarthy and his sympathizers were off the mark (of Hughes, Miller, and Wright, only Wright had been a member of the Communist Party, and he had publicly broken with it in 1944 in his essay “I Tried to Be a Communist”).

But even many who were appalled by McCarthy’s tactics agreed that the literary world of the late 1940s and early 1950s skewed to the left. To combat this imbalance, Henry Regnery in 1949 founded a publishing house dedicated to publishing conservative authors—and to combat the same imbalance in the magazine world one of Regnery’s authors, William F. Buckley, Jr., founded the magazine National Review in 1955. But the conservative principles that Regnery and his ilk adhered to had little in common with those of Trump and his followers in the 2020s—just as the principles of the liberals of the day had little in common with those of many on the left in the twenty-first century. Conservatives such as Regnery and Buckley advocated a less interventionalist approach to the economy, and spoke up in defence of what they saw as fixed moral truths as opposed to the relativism that they perceived to have permeated society. Among Regnery’s leading authors was Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind (1953), which came to be thought of as the bible of traditionalist (or classical) conservatism. The Regnery Company in general published (according to a columnist in the Bangor Daily Commercial) “books of almost universally high quality, focusing on philosophical works. … that [tend to reflect] one quality that distinguishes the best of modern thinking…, the rejection of the outlook that dominated the whole of the nineteenth century—the idea of infinite progress.”

The liberal consensus of the 1950s and early 1960s, on the other hand, (shared by many Eisenhower Republicans as well as most northern Democrats) took a largely Keynesian, collectivist approach to socio-economic matters, gave a high priority to issues of economic and social class, advocated tolerance towards those with views incompatible with one’s own—and held a devout belief that America was fundamentally good, together with a devout belief that continuing progress should always be a goal.

In some parts of the literary world, though, any sign of progress was difficult to discern. Between 1943 and 1960, not a single woman had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction or the National Book Award for Fiction. Not until the late 1960s was any black American—or Native American, or Latino American, or Asian American—awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. (Only one person of color—Ralph Ellison for Invisible Man in 1953—had ever been awarded the National Book Award for Fiction.) By the late 1960s many people were belatedly starting to notice that at least 95 percent of the American literary fiction published between 1940 and 1965 had been written by white authors—and that roughly three-quarters of those had been men. And white males occupied the vast majority of editorial and management positions in the publishing industry.

The literary world is looking very different in the 2020s. In 2025 roughly 70 and 80 percent of editorial and management positions in the book publishing industry were occupied by women, and roughly 20 percent were occupied by people of color. In the first 26 years of the twenty-first century, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded eight times to women and five times to writers of color; over the same period, the National Book Award for Fiction has been awarded twelve times to women and eleven times to people of color. Of the 30 finalists for the National Book Award between 2020 and 2025, only five were white men.

As in 1950, the vast majority of 2020s authors of literary fiction (and poetry, and drama) identify as liberal or left-leaning—as do the vast majority of editors, literary agents, and other editorial decision-makers in the literary world (over 95 percent of book editors in the United States report that they normally vote for the Democratic candidate).*

Between the 1990s and the 2020s, though, “left-leaning” had gradually come to mean something very different from what it had meant in 1950. By 2020, many on the left had relatively little interest in issues of social and economic class—but an overriding interest in issues of gender and of sexual orientation, of ethnicity and, especially, of race. Many had come to believe that, far from being fundamentally good, America was fundamentally a land of inequality and of racism. Many had come to doubt that progress was possible—and many had little tolerance towards those with views incompatible with their own (a tendency exacerbated by the rise of social media in the 2010s, and by algorithms that tended to turn social media forums into echo chambers).

Many in the literary community had also become convinced that authors’ behavior in their personal lives was a relevant consideration when it came to deciding whether or not their works should be read.** Starting in 2018, many high school teachers and university professors decided to drop Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian from their assigned reading lists—not because it showed America not living up to American ideals of fairness and equality (the complaint of the Florida school library authorities), but because Alexie had been accused of sexual harassment (and had issued a statement apologizing for having “done things that have harmed other people, including those I love most deeply”).

When it came to literary judgments, many in the literary community also focused largely on numbers—too largely, in the view of some. In a 2016 column, for example, the novelist Charles Finch described the phenomenon in this way:

A plague on our literary culture is this thing about counting. A prize list comes out and people rush to ask how many women are on it, then how many people of color, then how many women of color, then how many queer women of color, and on and on until at last Twitter runs the tally and confers either its approval or censure. It’s absurd, maddening. The trouble is that it’s also incalculably better than the old plague, which was never to count at all. The emergence of identity politics in America was, as Jackson Lears has succinctly observed, a tragic necessity.

Many of the ideological and attitudinal changes in the literary community played out over issues of language. Beginning in the 1960s, people had begun to realize that using he was an inappropriate way to refer to someone whose gender you did not know—and that linguistic matters of this sort made a real difference attitudinally. Over the course of the next sixty years hundreds of sexist, racist, ableist and ageist terms were replaced—most of them, with good reason. But as the twenty-first century wore on, a sense of over-reach began to be widespread. When a California school board member became “personally offended” when someone at a meeting used the word homeless rather than the word unhoused, the incident was fodder for Fox news and other conservative media outlets.

Language, then, is one of the many politically charged topics for the literary community; “staying in your lane” has become another. From the beginnings of American literature through to the mid twentieth century, it was a common practice for white authors to feature non-white protagonists in their fiction; classic examples include Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok (1824), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884). That practice carried on well into the twentieth century. Julia Peterkin’s Scarlet Sister Mary (1928), for example, features a black woman as a protagonist, and Oliver La Farge’s The Laughing Boy (1929) a Native American as its protagonist; both books were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Black American authors, it should be noted, have often done the same in reverse. Paul Dunbar’s 1904 story “The Lynching of Jube Benson,” for example, features a white protagonist (one whose thoughts and actions portray the workings of racial prejudice among white people perhaps more persuasively than any character in a piece of fiction written by a white author). By mid century it had become common practice for black American authors to occasionally publish works with white protagonists; in Ann Petry’s 1947 novel Country Place, in Richard Wright’s 1954 novel Savage Holiday, and in Lorraine Hansberry’s 1964 play The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, almost all the characters are white.

As identity politics came to the fore in the twenty-first century, though, many on the left came to believe that writers are best advised to stick to writing about people like themselves.*** When a group is represented in fiction by their “own voices,” (as Shuli de la Fuente-Lau puts it), “they will be seen “not with an observer’s gaze, but with the cultural nuance from being an active member of that culture.” In the other direction, “books not created by ‘own voices’ authors may leave out nuances and may inaccurately capture cultural elements.”

The word “active” here perhaps deserves special mention. The criticism of writers who have written about a culture without being an active member of that culture has sometimes been just as harsh as has criticism of writers who have written about cultures that have no claim to belong to. Jeanine Cummins, for example, has been roundly criticized for the way she writes in her 2020 novel American Dirt about a poor Mexican mother and her child; Cummins has a Puerta Rican grandmother, and thus identifies both as white and as Latina, but she has never lived in a poor Latina community. Critics linked Cummins’s lack of “lived experience” to her allegedly stereotypical portrayals of Latina characters.

But do portrayals of cultures that an author is not a member of necessarily suffer from these sorts of flaws? Are such portrayals bound to be filled with stereotypes, or can authors succeed if they approach the task of writing with care and sensitivity? Must authors always “stay in their own lane”?

The danger, in the view of authors such as Salman Rushdie and Henry Louis Gates,**** occurs when sensible guidelines for writers—that they approach the prospect of writing about members of other groups with care and consideration—harden into a prohibition against their writing about members of other groups. In a powerful 2021 speech to a PEN audience, Gates put the case clearly:

Whenever we treat an identity as something to be fenced off from those of another identity, we sell short the human imagination. … Social identities can connect us in multiple and overlapping ways; they are not protected but betrayed when we turn them into silos with sentries.

In similar fashion, Rushdie argued in a 2023 speech that it would be “the death of the novelist’s art” if writers were restricted to writing only about people of their own race, gender, ethnic or national group, or sexual orientation; he encouraged young writers to find the courage to “step out of their lane” and be willing to write about the lives of a wide range of people.

It may be instructive to look at the experience of American writers who have refused to stay in their lane, and have not been criticized for that choice—writers such Lynn Nottage, twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Like Gates and Rushdie, Nottage opposes “stay in your lane” strictures, which she sees as limiting cross-cultural empathy, and as particularly confining to writers from marginalized communities. But she emphasises the importance of authors taking care about what they write.

Nottage’s 2017 play Sweat involves an ensemble cast of nine factory workers in Reading, Pennsylvania—four blacks, four whites and one Latino; six men and three women. Three of the nine are in their twenties, the others middle aged. Nottage herself was middle aged when she came to write the play; she is a black woman from an educated middle-class background, and thereby in one or more important ways very different from all nine of the characters portrayed in the play. Of crucial importance: she did not rely only on her imagination in writing the play. She devoted an enormous amount of time to research, including years spent interviewing those who lived and worked in Reading, many of them middle-aged white steelworkers who had long been without work as a result of a company lockout. In such a situation, Nottage has said, one has to “replace judgment with curiosity.”

In some ways Nottage’s approach seems like a throwback to an earlier time. She firmly opposes “stay in your lane” restrictions. Though clearly left-of-center politically, her work engages with issues of class at least as deeply as it does with those of race or gender. And, much as she sees and feels deeply all that is negative about the American experience, she feels deeply too the pull of an America that can be better than it has been. Nottage prefaces Sweat with an eleven-line quotation from Langston Hughes’ 1936 poem “Let America Be America Again”:

O, yes,

I say it plain,

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath—

America will be!



Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,

The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,

We, the people, must redeem

The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.

The mountains and the endless plain—

All, all the stretch of these great green states—

And make America again!

If there is to be a peaceful resolution of the twenty-first century battles over the politics of literature (or at least a truce), it may well turn out to have been writers such as Lynn Nottage who have pointed the way forward.

* In a move that paralleled that of Henry Regnery in 1949, several American publishers have in the twenty-first century acknowledged the degree to which their existing publishing programs were not providing an outlet for conservative views, and have set up imprints (such as Penguin’s Sentinel imprint and Simon & Schuster’s Threshold Editions imprint) dedicated to publishing books with a conservative slant.

**In the mid-century American literary world, controversy had a different focus. In the high profile squabble over the 1949 decision of a jury led by T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, and Robert Lowell to award Ezra Pound the prestigious Bollingen Prize for The Pisan Cantos, for example, those objecting to the decision did not argue that the viciously antisemitic content of The Pisan Cantos should disqualify the book from being read and studied, or that Pound’s treasonous speeches during WWII should disqualify any of his work from being read or studied; their argument was simply that these things should disqualify Pound and The Pisan Cantos from receiving a prestigious award.

***This issue is sometimes conflated with the issue of appropriation of story material—a tangentially related but fundamentally separate question. Until the late twentieth century the literary community too often considered it entirely unproblematic if a white author “borrowed” an Indigenous myth or story as raw material for fiction—and there was rarely or ever any thought given to consulting anyone from the relevant Indigenous group when the “borrowing” occurred. In the twenty-first century, of course, all that has changed—and today’s literary and Indigenous communities are fully in agreement that the change is a positive one.

**** Criticisms of the “stay in your lane” approach to literary writing by writers such as Gates and Rushdie have been mild by comparison with those of some other writers. In 2024, for example, dramatist David Mamet denounced the “stay in your lane” approach as “fascist totalitarianism.” (Mamet’s political views had been liberal in the 1970s and 1980s, when he wrote the now classic plays American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross and he still identified as a liberal when he wrote his controversial 1992 play Oleanna (1992). In 2008, however, he broke with his liberal past in an article in The Village Voice entitled “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal,’” and thereafter he became increasingly intemperate in criticizing the political left.)

Mark Melnick's cover of the Theatre Communications Group edition of Lynn Nottage's Sweat approriately foregrounds a beer glass over a coffee thermos; the play is for the most part set in a bar in Reading, Pennsylvania.

Imagining Cleaners’ Work, and Cleaners’ Lives

If you’re looking to enter imaginatively into the life of someone who works as a cleaner or as a house-servant, what do you focus on? Their social status? Their economic circumstances? The physical reality of their daily life? Their emotions and their personal life? To even contemplate such questions is of course to have come a long way from the world of Jane Austen, where the very existence of servants is barely acknowledged, and where those whose existence is touched on usually remain nameless. That’s the starting point of Jo Baker’s marvelous 2013 novel Longbourn, which goes over much of the same ground as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice but is told from the point of view of Sarah, the Bennet’s housemaid. Extraordinarily engaging and often quite moving, Longbourn is utterly persuasive in its presentation of the realities of a life largely spent in cleaning other people’s dishes and other people’s clothes—the intellectual and emotional realities of such a life quite as much as the physical and economic ones.

A more recent example, Nita Prose’s The Maid, sets its sights much lower. The protagonist, Molly, is a good-hearted, enormously conscientious, neurodivergent employee of the luxurious Regency Hotel. Molly inadvertently becomes deeply involved with a criminal network operating within the hotel, and is herself accused of the murder. The story line works well enough, and Molly is an engaging character; in short, it’s a breezy read of a murder mystery, so one should not expect too much. But (as a former cleaner myself, albeit for only a brief time), I couldn’t help but feel the novel to be rather disappointing as a portrayal of this sort of working life. There is a good deal of description of the sorts of work that Molly and her fellow workers do, but almost nothing about the toll such work inevitably takes on the human body. In reading of Sarah’s life at Longbourn, one is frequently told of such things as “the calluses on her hands, or the swellings that pained her legs.” In The Maid, one is reminded again and again of Molly’s determination to return each hotel room “to a state of perfection,” but told little of the physical toll that must take. Nor, it seems to me, are the economic realities confronted as they deserve to be. Prose effectively conveys the financial hardship Molly suffers after her grandmother (a cleaner of houses, who Molly has shared an apartment with) dies, leaving Molly both grieving and falling behind on the rent. But Prose never connects the dots in any way that might suggest a systemic or collective problem rather than an individual financial predicament.

Toward the end of the novel, when Molly is promoted to head maid at the hotel, she receives a raise, and at about the same time she begins again to live in shared accommodation. Even then her circumstances allow her to save at only the most minimal level—“just a few hundred dollars” to start with, though it is described as enough that she can dream of one day being able to enroll in the hospitality program at the local community college. And then she receives an unexpected windfall—a $10,000 gift from a wealthy friend. “Life has a way of sorting itself out,” we are told at the book’s conclusion—one of the nuggets of wisdom that Molly’s grandmother once dispensed. “Everything will be okay in the end. And if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.” But it is the end of the book, and, much as things may have turned out okay for Molly, in the broader world that the book touches on, things are very far from okay. There is no suggestion that the other maids have received raises when Molly is promoted. Though we understand that their lives will be improved by having Molly as head maid rather than the hated Cheryl (who used to steal the tips meant for others on the housekeeping staff), presumably the ordinary cleaners are still not making a living wage.

A much more rounded portrayal of what life as a cleaner is really like can be found in the 4,000 words of Sherman Alexie’s* superb short story “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest” (originally published in the 29 May 2017 issue of The New Yorker), the story of Marie, who works for decades as part of the housekeeping staff at a motel. Here is part of the description of what the work does to Marie physically:

Marie’s knees and ankles hurt because she had so often squatted and kneeled to clean the floors.

Her feet hurt because she stood for most of the day. And she’d never owned a good pair of work shoes. She’d always promised herself that she would buy a better pair of shoes with the next paycheck.

But “with the next paycheck” was like saying “Dear Big Bang.”

Her lower back hurt because of all the times she had carried the vacuum and heavy bags of clean and dirty towels, and had thrown garbage and recycling and compost into the dumpsters in the alley behind the motel.

One day, she’d twisted her back so severely that she’d collapsed in pain on the sidewalk.

At the free clinic, she learned that “back spasms” was the fancy way to say “torn muscles.”

Once or twice a year since then, she’d torn her back again. But she’d missed only a few days of work because of her bad back. She’d spend one day in bed, recovering, and then she’d force herself back to cleaning, because she’d read that an injured back heals best during activity.…

Her hands hurt.

Arthritis.

Carpal-tunnel syndrome.

And the recurring rashes caused by the soaps and disinfectants and window cleaners.

Her skin itched and burned.

She tried wearing gloves at work, but that only made her rashes migrate from her hands to her wrists, forearms, and elbows. Some mornings, she woke with hands so stiff that she could not make fists. She could not hold her coffee cup or toothbrush. She’d submerge her hands in hot water and flex and flex and flex until her fingers worked properly again.

“It’s hard work,” she’d said to Father James. “But it’s not like working in a coal mine."

“Maybe it is,” he’d said.

Alexie’s “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest” is clear-eyed too on the economic front. There is no $10,000 windfall for Marie; her gift on her last day of work is that she is paid for a full day while being asked to clean only a single room. Then, her retirement send-off:

The owner gave Marie her last paycheck in cash. Two weeks’ worth of money. Six hundred dollars.

Then she got into her car. It started on the fourth try.

She drove home to her husband. He was sitting on their couch watching the midday news. He’d retired from his job at the hardware store a few months earlier.

With Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare and good luck, Marie and her husband would survive.

It would be difficult in a 4,000-word story to say much of the collective issues relating to the sort of work that Alexie describes—the urgent need for better wages and benefits for all workers in such jobs-though something of their importance can I think be inferred from a careful reading of "Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest." As Tony Keller pointed out in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, the reality today is that those “with the least bargaining power—in low-education and low-wage jobs, with limited benefits or job security—tend to have the fewest protections. If anyone needs some old-fashioned union representation, it’s them.” It is of course extraordinarily difficult for such workers to unionize, not least of all because unpleasant, low-paying jobs will almost inevitably have an extremely high turnover rate (another reality that is brought home vividly to readers of “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest”). But a high turnover rate is not the only obstacle; in many jurisdictions, governments have since the 1980s made it far more difficult for workers to act collectively.

It's interesting that the best portrayals of effective collective action over the past several decades have been in films rather than in books. Norma Rae and Made in Dagenham are well known examples; less well known but at least as good is Bread and Roses (directed by Ken Loach, and starring Adrien Brody, Elpidia Carrillo, and Pilar Padilla), a brilliant 2000 film based on a true story of the successful struggle of Los Angeles janitorial workers to unionize. I can’t think of any finer example of a work of art that gives an equally powerful and equally moving sense of individual lives and of the collective reality of life for a group of oppressed workers.

In very different ways, both The Maid and Bread and Roses are heartwarming stories of working-class heroes. I recommend them both to anyone, without reservation. But I have to wonder if the very different levels of success they have met with might say anything about twenty-first century society. The Maid (which will soon also be a movie), a perfectly pleasant portrayal of an individual life that in no way challenges the socio-economic status quo, has been a number one bestseller both in Canada and in the United States. Bread and Roses, a deeply moving individual story that is also a profound exploration of a broader socio-economic reality, earned only $533,479 at the box office, and is not always easy to find today, either on streaming services or as a DVD. It’s worth the search!

*Anyone nowadays who praises any aspect of the work of Sherman Alexie has to accept that some readers may respond with surprise and with disapproval. Given that background, I should make clear that praising “Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest” as an extraordinarily accomplished and richly evocative work of fiction should in no way be construed as a defence of its author against the series of accusations of sexual harassment that surfaced in 2018—any more than praising Le Morte Darthur should be construed as a defence of Sir Thomas Malory against accusations of rape, or than praising Four Quartets should be construed as a defence of T.S. Eliot against charges of misogyny and antisemitism.

Alex Colville, Hotel Maid (61/75), 1978. (Copyright © Alex Colville; reproduced with permission). The serigraph print is one of a series of ten that Colvlle did on various forms of work.