During the 1930s, in both Canada and the United States, she pressures of mass culture and of an increasingly isolated literary avant-garde constrained the options available to leftist writers. The essay argues that socialist writers in both countries offered similar critiques of that situation. The body of the essay compares the different solutions American and Canadian writers proposed — in the organization of literary periodicals and in literary form. I argue that because the US left centred on the Communist Party during the thirties, its literary wing pursued a vanguardist model of organizing and emphasized literary objectivism. By contrast, the presence of an increasingly strong social-democratic party in Canada meant the literary left chose to emphasize coalition-building and literary realism. The essay concludes by arguing that these differences amount to two distinct intellectual patterns which are still recognizable today.