A fellow traveler (US English) or fellow traveller (Commonwealth English) is a person who sympathizes with the beliefs of an organization or cooperates in its activities without maintaining formal membership in that particular group. In the early Soviet Union the approximate term was used without negative connotation to describe writers and artists sympathetic to the goals of the Russian Revolution who declined to join the Communist Party. The English-language phrase came into vogue in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s as a pejorative term for a sympathizer of Communism or particular Communist states, who was nonetheless not a "card-carrying member" of a Communist party.
Famous quotes containing the words fellow traveler, fellow and/or traveler:
“The literary “fellow travelers” of the Revolution.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)
“You could not hate the cannibal they wrote
Of, with the nostril bone-thrust, who could dote
On boiled or roasted fellow thigh and throat.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)
“And I away in my opposite wood
Am touched by that unintimate light
And made feel less alone than I rightly should,
For traveler there could do me no good
Were I in trouble with night tonight.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)