Proletarian Literature - Proletarian Novel

Proletarian Novel

The proletariat are citizen of the lowest class), usually the working class; a member of such a class is proletarian. The proletarian novel is a sub genre of the novel, written by workers mainly for other workers. It overlaps and sometimes is synonymous with: the working class novel, socialist novel, social problem novel (also problem novel or sociological novel or social novel), propaganda or thesis novel, socialist realism novel. The adjective proletarian is not normally used to describe works about the working class by middle class authors, like Charles Dickens's Hard Times and Henry Green's Living.

The proletarian novel is frequently seen as an instrument to promote social reform or political revolution among the working classes. Proletarian literature is the mainstay of writings created especially by communist, socialist and anarchist authors. It is about the lives of poor, working class individuals, and the period 1930 to 1945 in particular produced many such novels, in various parts of the world, about the lives of the working-class. However, there were works before and after these dates. In Britain the term working class literature, novel etc. is more generally used. The intention of the writers of proletarian literature is to lift the workers from the ghetto, by inspiring them to embrace to possibilities of social change or a political revolution.

Based on the political and literary ideas of Gorki (whom the Russians claim to have written the first proletarian novel), also inspired by the novels of the anarchists of the decade of the 1920s (Wobblies or Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and later promoted by Joseph Stalin as an important part of the movement called socialist realism, the proletarian novel had its greatest period of success between 1930 and the early 1940s. The thirties were the years of the Great Depression and the writers with a Marxist inclination hoped to inspire and begin the social revolution that Marx and other thinkers had prophesied.

Proletarian or working class novels were written in Germany, England, France, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and numerous other countries, as well as in the United States.

The most important American writers gathered in the First American Writers Congress of 1935 (see Hart's volume), which was supported by Stalin. See the League of American Writers which was backed by the Communist Party USA. Famous among the international writers were Georg Fink (pseudonym of the German writer Kurt Münzer), Mike Gold of New York (both of whom were Jewish), José Revueltas of Mexico, Nicomedes Guzmán of Chile, Jorge Icaza of Ecuador, and numerous others.