Peter Howard Proletarian library, 1979

Early in 1980, McFarlin Library acquired a major collection of proletarian literature based on Walter Rideout's The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954. However, this collection of over 2,000 items goes beyond the genre Rideout studied. In addition to novels by such figures as Upton Sinclair, Sherwood Anderson, Edward Dahlberg, Maxwell Bodenheim, James T. Farrell, Josephine Herbst, Waldo Frank, Nelson Algren, Dalton Trumbo, and Norman Mailer, there are plays, poetry, anthologies, ephemeral and fugitive pieces of proletarian writing, music, and periodicals. Many items in the collection are especially valuable for the study of interrelations between literature and society that this proletarian collection will support.