Author's note: I would like to thank the following people for their support, advice, and criticism: Joan Shelley Rubin, David Duke, Michael Smith, Alan Lawson, Robert Rosenstone, Casey Blake, Corliss Lamont-and last but hardly least, the Fox family, who showed me Oregon. Thanks also to Kathleen Manwaring of the George Arents Research Library at Syracuse University. Citations of the Reed Mss. by permission of the Houghton Library.

1. “Success,” TS, John Reed Manuscripts (Reed Mss.), Houghton Library, Harvard University. Compare the stories described by Smith, Carl in Chicago and the American Literary Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 57–90Google Scholar, and Sinclair, Upton's The Journal of Arthur Stirling (New York: Appleton, 1903).Google Scholar

2. Aside from the random observations in Hicks, Granville, John Reed: The Making of a Revolutionary (New York: Macmillan, 1936)Google Scholar, and Rosenstone, Robert, Romantic Revolutionary (New York: Knopf, 1975)Google Scholar, the sole accounts to date are Henderson, Harry III, “John Reed's Urban Comedy of Revolution,” Massachusetts Review 14 (Spring 1973): 421–35Google Scholar; the introduction by editor Stuart, John to The Education of John Reed (New York: International Publishers, 1955), pp. 7–38Google Scholar; and Stoller, Leo's reprinted 1947 Master's thesis in The Collected Poems of John Reed, ed. Lamont, Corliss (Westport, Ct.: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1985).Google Scholar

3. Hicks, , p. 330Google Scholar. This idea is most evident in the notion that Reed “found himself as a poet with “My America,” a poem (like several others) written in obvious imitation of Whitman. See Hicks, , p. 302Google Scholar, and Stuart, , pp. 33–35Google Scholar. But that this imitation was more “true” to Reed's spirit than others remains unconvincing. Compare Rosenstone, , pp. 256–57, 302–05.Google Scholar

4. Eastman, Max, “Jack Reed—A Memoir,” in The Complete Poetry of John Reed, ed. Robbins, Jack Alan (Freeman, S.D.: Pine Hill Press, 1973), pp. 135–36Google Scholar. See also Eastman, 's “Bunk About Bohemia,” Modern Monthly 8 (05 1934): 200–08Google Scholar; Gold, Mike, “John Reed and the Real Thing,” in The Mike Gold Reader, ed. Folsom, Michael (New York: International Publishers, 1972), pp. 152–56Google Scholar; and Lippmann, Walter, “Legendary John Reed,” New Republic 1 (12 26, 1914): 15–16.Google Scholar

5. Cf. Fishbein, Leslie, Rebels in Bohemia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), p. 184Google Scholar. Just because Reed and others shied away from a deductive project of literary criticism, however, does not mean their literary practice lacked “self-awareness.” Elsewhere I have written about similar oversights in regard to prewar radical literary ideology. See my “Sinclair Lewis and the Passing of Capitalism,” american studies 24 (Fall 1983): 95–108Google Scholar, and “Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Steady Burghers: The Terrain of Herland,” Women's Studies 12 (1986), 271–292.Google Scholar

6. “More serious,” because even Rosenstone tends to emphasize Reed's humorous work, e.g., for the Harvard Lampoon. For accounts of Reed's juvenalia, see Rosenstone, , pp. 15, 20, 21, 27–28, 32–34Google Scholar. For a solid bibliography of Reed's literary work, see Hicks's appendix.

7. For a rather dismissive account of Reed's “lyrical” politics, see Diggins, John, The American Left in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), pp. 87–97 and ff.Google Scholar

8. Hicks, , pp. 49, 93Google Scholar; Rosenstone, , pp. 36–59, 372Google Scholar; and “Almost Thirty.”

9. Lamentably, Reed's own hagiography, “Charles Townsend Copeland,” American 73 (11 1911): 64–66Google Scholar, is hopelessly vague. Compare Rosenstone, , pp. 47–48, 53, and passimGoogle Scholar; and Hicks, , p. 36.Google Scholar

10. All information from Adams, J. Donald, Copey of Harvard (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), pp. 125–190Google Scholar; Broun's story on p. 174. On Reed in particular, and the Conrad letter, see pp. 185–93.

11. Reed later reprinted a revealing exchange with Copeland as the frontispiece to Insurgent Mexico. Reed praised his teacher as the one who taught “how to see the hidden beauty of the visible world; that to be your friend is to try to be intellectually honest.” But Reed also remembered a tension: “I remember you thought it strange that my first trip abroad [to Europe after graduation] didn't make me want to write about what I saw there.” With Insurgent Mexico, Reed said, he fulfilled Copeland's earlier charge (New York: International Publishers, 1969).Google Scholar

12. Rosenstone asserts, in a bit of an overstatement, that Copeland failed to publish. Copeland did author several books, among others: Letters of Thomas Carlyle to his Youngest Sister (edited) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899)Google Scholar, Edwin Booth (Boston: Small Maynard & Co, 1901)Google Scholar; Freshman English and Theme-Correcting in Harvard College (New York: Silver, Burdett & Co., 1901)Google Scholar; and the Copeland Reader (New York: Scribner's, 1926).Google Scholar

13. Adams, , pp. 125–26Google Scholar. To one of T. S. Eliot's papers, intriguingly a trashing of Kipling (whom Eliot later resurrected), in which Eliot had complained, “Mr. Kipling was always more anxious to be striking than to be convincing,” Copeland responded: “Don't you suppose that he expects to convince by being striking?” (Adams, , p. 160).Google Scholar

14. Quotation from letter of September 11, 1912, reprinted in Poetry 17 (01 1921): 209Google Scholar. See also Rosenstone on Reed's cheerleading, p. 44. Several scholars have also compared Reed's craft in Insurgent Mexico to that of mural painters like Diego Rivera; see Renato LeDuc's introduction to Insurgent Mexico, p. 19Google Scholar, and Rosenstone, , p. 167.Google Scholar

15. Lears, T. J. Jackson's No Place of Grace (New York: Pantheon, 1983)Google Scholar has greatly influenced my understanding of Reed's antimodernism-as has, to a lesser degree, Lasch, Christopher's New Radicalism in America (New York: Knopf, 1965)Google Scholar. To see these currents in Reed's psychological makeup, compare esp. Rosenstone's account (pp. 36–38) of a college story called “The Red Hand,” Harvard Monthly 46 (04 1908): 72–77Google Scholar, with Lears's discussion of Norris, Frank's “Lauth,” pp. 130–31.Google Scholar

16. Even during college, Reed returned West for a two-hundred-mile hike down the Oregon coast. See “From Clatsop to Nekarney,” Harvard Monthly 47 (12 1908): 110–13.Google Scholar

17. From this point on, except where indicated, all poetry citations will appear in the text with page numbers from the Lamont, Collected Poems.Google Scholar See also the poem “Willamette” (1910)Google Scholar, Robbins, , p. 51.Google Scholar

18. Quote from “Almost Thirty.” See also the poem “Flowers of Fire” (1909), p. 40.Google Scholar

19. See “The Singing Gates,” Harvard Monthly 47 (02 1909): 247–50Google Scholar, and “The Winged Stone,” Harvard Monthly 48 (04 1909): 77–86.Google Scholar

20. For information about the state's actual name origin, see Lavender, David, Westward Vision: The Story of the Oregon Trail (New York: McGraw Hill, 1963), p. 53.Google Scholar

21. In “Bacchanal,” Harvard Monthly 44 (06 1907): 210–12Google Scholar, Reed depicts a solitary wayward traveler in Thessaly who stumbles upon an uncharted temple. There, inspired by every tree “swaying and whispering to its neighbor-tales of the old days, the changes of thirty centuries, the secret history of ancient Greece,” he dreams of a priestess dancing to Bacchic music, entreating the narrator by voicing the refrain of “Eros … Eros.” As the vision fades, Reed concludes: “It had grown colder-the shadows were saddened-the world was drearier.”

22. In adhering to Reed's upbeat image, Hicks was perhaps incorrect to assert (p. 212) that “melancholy” was a rare thing with Reed; in fact, his poetry is shot through with lamentation, grief, dirges, and disunion. See Reed's witty selfparody entitled “My Lady of Pain” (1908–09?) in Robbins, , p. 32Google Scholar. If anything, Reed rather rarely applied the sonnet form to its traditional subject, love.

23. On this romantic posture, see Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (1958; rpt. Edinburgh: R. R. Clark, 1961), pp. 48–64Google Scholar. In a broadside dedicated to Eastman (1916), Reed called his friend a poet who “… with his' breath/Fanned up the noble fires that smoulder in the breast/Of the oppressed” (Robbins, , p. 89).Google Scholar

24. “The Pharoah,” Harvard Monthly 47 (01 1909): 156–60.Google Scholar

25. See also Rosenstone, , pp. 156–57Google Scholar, and Tuck, Jim, Pancho Villa and John Reed: Two Faces of Romantic Revolution (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984), esp. pp. 207–20Google Scholar. On amoralism and force in antimodernism, see esp. Lears, , pp. 136–39Google Scholar. See also Reed's comments on Russia, in Rosenstone, , p. 234.Google Scholar

26. In Insurgent Mexico (the book about which Reed said “I wrote better than I have ever written”), he found a perfect canvas for his technique: a land of “red porphyry mountains” (p. 40), “the turquoise cup of sky [which] held an orange powder of clouds” (p. 53), and a people seemingly “close to nature” (p. 217). Pancho Villa's life is transcribed as “a new ballad being born” (p. 122), the epic tale of a hero who “encountered the twentieth century with the naive simplicity of a savage” (p. 123). This book closes, in fact, with an elegiac image of the “Mexican Middle Ages” surrounded by “the great sea of modern life-machinery, scientific thought, and political theory” (p. 298)-a wave of Western progress it cannot long resist.

27. See also Rosenstone, , p. 84.Google Scholar

28. Jack London called it merging the “school of God” with the “school of clod”; Upton Sinclair, injecting “the spirit of Shelley” into “the form of Zola”; Frank Norris, seeing that “there is as much Romance on Michigan Avenue as there is in King Arthur's Court.” See my “American Naturalism and the Problem of Sincerity,” American Literature 54 (12 1982): 511–27.Google Scholar

29. On the premium such magazines put on “cleverness” of this kind, see Dolmetsch, Carl R., The Smart Set: A History and Anthology (New York: Dial, 1966), pp. 6, 17Google Scholar; and editor Rascoe, Burton's introduction to The Smart Set Anthology (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1934), pp. xxii–xxiii.Google Scholar

30. For a fuller account of this process in regard to London et. al., see my The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985).Google Scholar

31. “Art for Art's Sake: A Few Animadversions Upon the Writing Game,” [1912], Reed Mss. Compare Rosenstone, pp. 77–89. This suggests another legacy of Harvard was Reed's residual belief in amateurism. In many ways, an antiprofessional current ran throughout the prewar years; see The Labor of Words, p. 196Google Scholar. In Eastman, Max's Journalism Versus Art (New York: Knopf, 1916)Google Scholar, e.g., Eastman wrote that “what magazine writing needs to-day is a standard of amateurism” (p. 79) (emphasis in the original).

32. Reed, to Hunt, E. E., 27 07 1911, Reed Mss.Google Scholar

33. Normally one is reluctant to use the term “potboilers,” but everyone to date agrees this is what they are: cf. Hicks, , p. 222Google Scholar, and Rosenstone, passim. The editors of the Smart Set, however, did choose to anthologize one story. See note below.

34. The tales referred to here are “The Barber of Lille,” Metropolitan 42 (07 1915): 30–35, 40–41Google Scholar; “The Peripatetic Prince,” reprinted in The Smart Set Anthology, ed. Rascoe, Burton and Conklin, Graff (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1934), pp. 423–35Google Scholar; and “The Last Clinch,” Metropolitan 44 (11 1916): 23–25, 41–42, 44.Google Scholar

35. Compare Upton Sinclair's remarks about “killing Spaniards” for Street and Smith as a dime novelist, cited in Dell, Floyd, Upton Sinclair: A Study in Social Protest (New York: Doran, 1927), p. 44.Google Scholar

36. “Almost Thirty.”

37. One entitled “Proud New York” (1919)Google Scholar calls the city “the cruel / Youngest of all the world's great towns,” calling back the exile (like Reed himself at the time) “To do thy bitter will” (p. 117)Google Scholar; other unpublished lines say to the city “How you have changed! How glorious / Hateful, tyrannical and vain …” “On Returning to the City” (1918) speaks of Manhattan as “A Titaness without a lover, / Ringed with a million such as I / Burning to take her passionately- / Burning to buy what is not priced” (pp. 115–16).

38. Rosenstone, (p. 84)Google Scholar makes a similar observation.

39. For a similarly optimistic prognosis-and I think a forced exercise in positive thinking-see also his “The Involuntary Ethics of Big Business: A Fable for Pessimists,” clipping in scrapbook, Box 6, Reed Mss.

40. Reed, , [Article on New York], TS written 10 16, 1912, Reed Mss.Google Scholar

41. Rosenstone, (p. 246)Google Scholar unfortunately lumps these efforts in with other 1916 tales in which he finds a “lack of technical proficiency fused with a deficiency of insight.” See also Hicks, , pp. 174–75.Google Scholar

42. The Reed Collection in the Houghton Library now contains a rediscovered copy of Crane, 's George's MotherGoogle Scholar, a Heinemann Sevenpenny edition Reed owned. Neither Robert Rosenstone, David Duke, nor Corliss Lamont recalls seeing this volume in their own researches. (R.R. to the author, October 1, 1984; D.D. to the author, June 29, 1985; C.L. to the author, June 26, 1985).

43. Granā, César, “French Impressionism as an Urban Art Form,” in Fact and Symbol: Essays in the Sociology of Art and Literature (New York: Oxford, 1971), pp. 65–94.Google Scholar

44. Cf. Trachtenberg, Alan, “Experiments in Another Country: Stephen Crane's City Sketches,” in American Realism, ed. Sundquist, Eric (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 138–54Google Scholar; Shulman, Robert, “Community, Perception, and the Development of Stephen Crane: From The Red Badge to ‘The Open Boat,’” American Literature 50 (11 1978): 441–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45. All citations in text from the separate tales in Reed, John, Adventures of a Young Man (San Francisco: City Lights, 1975).Google Scholar

46. For moments in Crane that make these images seem like imitations, see Stephen Crane (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 539, 540–41, 11.Google Scholar

47. Cf. Kinser, Suzanne L., “Prostitutes in the Art of John Sloan,” Prospects 10 (1984): 231–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Clark, T. J., The Painting of Modern Life (New York: Knopf, 1985), pp. 79–146.Google Scholar

48. Robert Martin makes the point that many of the “debunking” satirists of the 1910s were lapsed idealist poets. See H. L. Mencken and the Debunkers (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984).Google Scholar

49. As Clark explains (p. 49): “It is one thing to argue that the capitalist city lacks intelligible form … it is quite another to say it lacks order, that it is uncontrolled or classless.” For the term degagé, see Granā, , p. 93.Google Scholar

50. See Reed's remarks on Steffens in “Almost Thirty.” For a discussion of Steffens's journalism, see The Labor of Words, pp. 177–78.Google Scholar

51. At the end of the tale, benefactor and bum have the following exchange: “‘You see, [the bricklayer says,] ‘… you just had to save somebody tonight. I understand. I got an appetite like that, too. Only mine's women.’ Whereupon I left that ungrateful bricklayer and went to wake up Drusilla, who alone understands me.”

52. Clark, , p. 69Google Scholar, and Smith, Carl, pp. 101–70.Google Scholar

53. “Almost Thirty.”

54. Randolph Bourne, quoted in Hansen, Olaf, The Radical Will (New York: Urizen, 1977), p. 44.Google Scholar