Remembering a Literary Radical

To the many progressive reforms advocated in America shortly before World War I, some intellectuals could give partial sympathy but not whole-hearted commitment. Radical young intellectuals, fueled by Wells, Shaw, and Whitman, calling themselves socialists and Bergsonians, and scorning all things genteel and “puritan,” were impatient with the liberal tendency to define “the promise of American life” in strictly political and economic terms. These literary radicals, as ...