In 1952 James T. Farrell published a novel which also dealt with Communism in the mid-thirties. It was _Yet Other Waters_, the story of Bernard Carr’s attraction to Marxism and his subsequent break with it. This sometimes turgid book centers around the relation of the writer to the Communist movement. Many of the phenomena of the period are there: the magazines purveying a Marxist interpretation of literature, the writers’ councils and congresses, the attempts to generate a party literature. Never a member of the Party, Carr is torn between an attraction to its stated aims and repulsion at its rigid control of thought and art. He joins picket lines, reads a paper at a Congress, and then sees the Communists turn a Socialist meeting into a riot. When he breaks with his party friends, he is given “the treatment.” He is vilified in the left wing papers and reviews as party hacks make a concerted attempt to destroy his literary reputation. (And, of course, this attempted destruction of his means of livelihood is the same method used by the extreme Right to punish political divergency in _The Troubled Air_ and _Stranger Come Home_.) Unfortunately, the charge that Farrell has a tin ear in writing dialogue is true. This long book has a considerable cumulative effect, but one pays for it by wading through many slow-moving passages. On the whole, though, it is a convincing portrait in depth, valuable also for its retroactive anticipation of the so-called “Literature of Disillusionment” which was to come from such writers as Silone and Koestler. Like Hemingway’s _For Whom the Bell Tolls_, Dos Passos’ _Adventures of a Young Man_ had in its later sections described the fight against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Both novels recorded the infiltration of the Loyalist forces by the Communists and the supremacy which they achieved in many sectors. In his next book, _Number One_, Dos Passos turned his attention to a source of growing concern to many Americans: dictatorship on the state level as exemplified by the Long machine in Louisiana. Two other novels, Adria Locke Langley’s _A Lion Is in the Streets_ (1945) and Robert Penn Warren’s _All the King’s Men_ (1946), are similar to it, although the quality of the writing varies greatly. Dos Passos’s style is characteristically dispassionate and panoramic. Warren’s book, despite devices smacking of melodrama, has sweep and a highly evocative poetic prose. Langley’s novel is full of worn devices: the faithful mammy with the corn-pone accent, the deathbed message, hidden documents, and a shadowy avenger. But all three books have their primary historical source in the career of Huey Long or the forces in American political life which he typified. =Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos: Global War and Politics=