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The revival of the literature of the 30's through which we have recently been living—the republication of novels long out of print, the redemption of reputations long lapsed, the compilation of anthologies long overdue—has been oddly one-sided, a revival of one half only of the literary record of that dark decade: the urban, Marxist, predominantly Jewish half, whose leading, journal was the New Masses and whose monster-in-chief was Joseph Stalin. And this skewed emphasis, though somewhat misleading, is comprehensible enough; for we live at a moment when a large reading public, educated by a second generation of urban Jewish writers (ex-Marxists, this time around), begins by identifying with certain contemporary literary heroes, like Moses Herzog, whose minds were made by this 30's tradition, and ends by wanting to read the books they read: the fiction of Nathanael West and Daniel Fuchs and Henry Roth, even Mike Gold's Jews Without Money.

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