Reviewed by: The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s by Milton A. Cohen Kevin R. West The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s. By Milton A. Cohen. U of Missouri P, 2018, 382 pp. Hardcover $44.00. In this well-researched study, Milton Cohen documents the shifting political attitudes of John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, and Ernest Hemingway throughout the 1930s and early 1940s with an eye toward mapping the factors that led each author to move toward and then away from an identifiably leftist praxis. Cohen combines biographical and epistolary evidence with a reading of each authorâs major novel of the periodâThe Grapes of Wrath, Native Son, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, respectivelyâto investigate how the authors found invigorating paradigms in collectivist commitments for literary production and social critique as well as irreconcilable contradictions. According to Cohen, each authorâs attraction to leftist ideology was a product primarily of self-interest and concern for topical issues as opposed to a more general commitment to socialist or communist valuesâalthough Wright was a member of the Communist Party for several years and all three authors contributed to left-leaning publications (Hemingwayâs 1935 article âWho Murdered the Vets?â in The New Masses likely being the key publication for Hemingway Review [End Page 111] readers, with the keynote address at the 1937 League of American Writers Congress as an important follow-up performance). Despite clear sympathies with the disenfranchised members of various societies, all three novelists qua novelists necessarily found their strong individualism in conflict with collectivist demands, an internal tension that Cohen sees mirrored in the protagonists of each of the three novels. In the case of Wright, the failure of the Communist Party of America to explicitly oppose racismâor its insistence that race was a subset of class and not the proper focus of revolutionary energiesâled to his dramatic and explicit ouster from the Party. Native Sonâs protagonist Bigger Thomas may be decidedly unsympathetic, Cohen avers, but the racism he experiences at least partially causes his criminality, and Wright as an African-American writer eventually came to see that the struggle for racial equality could no longer remain subordinate to some supposedly larger struggle for economic revolution. Or, rather, as Cohen determines from his close reading of the novelâs final pages, the communist vision (as expressed by Biggerâs lawyer Max) is not in fact sufficiently large for Wright: in his crucial essay âHow âBiggerâ Was Born,â Wright reports how he came to see that the human right to self-determination exceeded politics and race. Cohen, along with Keneth Kinnamon, sees the tension between Max and Bigger at the novelâs end as reflective of Wrightâs vacillation between the misaligned (though not mutually exclusive) goals of communism and civil rights. Likewise, Cohen finds the âcentral contradictionâ of The Grapes of Wrath to be the lack of coherence between the ârugged individualism of the pioneering farmersâ and the collective action required to challenge the powers arrayed against them (181). Cohen incisively notes the Joadsâ blindness to their ancestorsâ appropriation of Native American lands even as they experience the appropriation of their own lands and labor; surely they ought to see that group solidarity must supersede clan solidarity, but the novelâs early, strident, âcollective âweâ . . . seems to shrivel to the familial âweâ of the Joads in the final chaptersâ (207). The novelâs mixed messages as to what constitutes ownership and what drove the Joads from âtheirâ landâthe weather, the capitalists, or the tractorsâserve to index Steinbeckâs inability to synthesize his interest in âpeople not classesâ and his conviction that âthe principle of private ownership as a means of production is not long with usâ (205). Even if Steinbeck did not consider himself a communist, Cohen rightly observes that his anti-capitalism certainly sounds communist, even as he lacked clear ideas about what would [End Page 112] replace private ownership. âJust as the novelâs contradictions reflect an author blinded by his passionate partisanship,â Cohen concludes, âits failure to show the âweâ coalescing politically hints...