Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR LITERARY MISSILES The American people now realize with alarm that we have been squandering our scientific genius. Our peril is very grave. What then is happening to our intellectual...
...He complied, naming a volume of essays and verse of mine, The Flea of Sodom, very hostile to Marxist ideology...
...Is my own new book, The Sorrows of Priapus—just published by New Directions with drawings by the American artist Ben Shahn—and the books of others who disavow Communism to be done to death...
...The same foe that is threatening the United States with missiles is also laying waste our literature...
...How many realize that a book, like Joseph's bloodied coat of many colors, can be cast into the ditch of oblivion by a sub rosa Stalinist because the author has made avowals of his detestation of the Soviet Union...
...In 1940, Harcourt, Brace published my book on American literature, Do These Bones Live, in which I compared Stalin with Hitler...
...Richard Aldington, Edmund Wilson and Arnold Bennett were strong adherents of my literary labors...
...Ford Maddox Ford had written about my work in Fortune...
...My book was not reviewed or noticed in the newspapers or periodicals...
...Formerly it was a commonplace for some novel or article of mine to be referred to in New York magazines, papers, and the little magazines of poetry...
...but how long can we wait for the Communists to send every missile they have, including literary fifth columnists, to destroy our heritage, our land and our people...
...In 1950, the editor of the New York Herald Tribune book section asked the eminent American poet, William Carlos Williams, to name the three best books that had been published that year...
...The gods of justice grind their millstones slowly...
...The Central Committee of the Communist party warned a Stalinist who had been seen talking with me that he would be expelled were he ever in my company again...
...The American Communists were virulent...
...What then is happening to our intellectual strength, American poetry, novels and essays...
...But after my attacks on Communism I fell into total oblivion...
...My book was listed in the Tribune book section, but no review of the volume ever appeared...
...D. H. Lawrence had done a lengthy foreword to my first novel...
...Palma de Mallorca, Spain Edward Dahlberg...
...The editor of the Nation would not conseRt to have my book noticed or even mentioned there...
Vol. 41 • June 1958 • No. 6
