Includes bibliographical references (pages 379-408) and index.

"This collection presents all of Earle Birney's known published and unpublished works on Trotsky and Trotskyism for the very first time: their correspondence, a selection of Birney's letters, and his literary writings. From 1933 to 1940, Leon Trotsky was the focus of Birney's work and much of his life, corresponding with the great Russian revolutionary, organizing Trotskyist cells, and recruiting on behalf of Trotskyism. This volume traces the origins of Trotsky's mistrust of "the British" to his experiences in Canada and includes the largest body of Trotskyist criticism in Canadian literary history. Of equal importance, "Conversations with Trotsky" shows the need for a radical re-reading of Birney's poetry in light of his Trotskyism." (Book Cover)

CONTENTS:

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

I AN "OPTIMISTIC SORT OF REVOLUTIONARY," 1933-1935

1. Report to the Toronto Branch of the International Left Opposition

2. Letter to an American Medical Student

3. Mine Strike, Martial Law and a Student Delegation

4. To the Section Bureau, CPUSA, Salt Lake City, Utah

5. To the Salt Lake Section Committee, CPUSA

6. A Letter Refused by the Salt Lake City Press

7. In Defence of Party Democracy

8. The Struggle Against British Imperialism

II CONVERSATIONS WITH TROTSKY, 1935

9. Birney to Trotsky, 5 November 1935

10. Interviewing Leon Trotsky, 19-23 November 1935

11. Conversations with Trotsky

12. Further Conversations with Trotsky

13. Trotsky on the Canadian Farmer

14. Birney to Trotsky, 8 December 1935

15. Birney to Trotsky, 16 December 1935

III POLITICAL WRITINGS, 1935-1939

16. Incident in Berlin

17. Trotsky to Birney, 19 January 1936

18. Birney to Trotsky, 14 February 1936

19. Birney to Trotsky, 27 February 1936

20. Birney to Trotsky, 29 January 1937

21. Another Month - January

22. Another Month - February

23. Another Month - March

24. Birney to Joe Hansen, 15 November 1937

25. Trotsky to Birney, 27 November 1937

26. Birney to Trotsky, 2 January 1938

27. Canadian Capitalism and the Strategy of the Revolutionary Movement

28. The Land of the Maple Leaf Is the Land of Monopoly

29. Is French Canada Going Fascist ?

30. Trotsky to Birney, 5 June 1939

31. Birney to Trotsky, 6 June 1939

32. War Is Here - What Now?

IV LITERATURE AND REVOLUTION, 1934-1940

33. Escape by Emetic

34. On "Proletarian Literature"

35. The Brave New Words of Aldous Huxley

36. Cecil Day Lewis, The Loving Communist

37. Proletarian Literature: Theory and Practice

38. What Do Canadians Tell Stories About?

39. R.M. Fox: Worker-Fighter

40. Soviet Fiction and American Fustian

41. The Importance of Being Ernest Hemingway

42. Polygamous Communists from Toronto to Salt Lake

43. Yorkshire Proletarians

44. The Rhymes of the Irish Revolution

45. The Lost Irish Lenin?

46. Onward with Edward Upward

47. The Two William Faulkners

48. John Bull's Other Hell

49. The English Worker

50. New Writing in Britain and Elsewhere

51. The Fiction of James T. Farrell

52. The New Byronism: Poets and the Spanish Civil War

53. Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath

54. The Left Theatre in English

55. Whitewashing the Stalinist Persecutors of Artists

56. The Mad Sanity of Henry Miller

57. To Arms with Canadian Poetry

58. Fashion and Change on Broadway, or Propaganda Is What You Disagree With

59. New Writing and Literary Stalinism

60. Erika Mann and the Middle-Class Martyrs of Fascism

61. Literary Stalinism: Lehmann vs. Birney

62. Changing Minds in Wartime

V ENVOI, 1940

63. In Memory: Lev Davidovich Bronstein

Acronyms and abbreviations

Textual sources

Works cited