Harvey Swados

Harvey Swados (October 28, 1920 – December 11, 1972) was an American social critic and author of novels, short stories, essays and journalism.

Born in Buffalo, New York, Harvey Swados was the son of Aaron Meyer Swados, a physician, and Rebecca (Bluestone) Swados, a musician and artist whose father was a pioneer Zionist.

Both parents' backgrounds were European Jewish.

Almost uniformly, uncles, aunts and cousins on both sides of his family were degreed professionals—doctors, dentists, lawyers—but Swados aspired from an early age to a writer's life.

Simultaneous with an upper-middle-class upbringing, Swados developed an acute awareness of his social surroundings.

During his childhood and early adolescent years in Buffalo during the Great Depression, he often witnessed his father treating unemployed patients without charging a fee.

Strongly influenced by the political and social convictions of his sister Felice Swados (who had many discussions at the Hunter Colony run by Margaret Lefranc), and while still an undergraduate, Swados also initiated during this period what was to become a lengthy relationship with the anti-Stalinist American Left and, by the late 1930s, had affiliated himself with the Leon Trotsky–inspired and Max Shachtman–led Workers Party (U.S.), whose adherents included novelist James T. Farrell and democratic socialist theorist, literary critic and social historian Irving Howe.

In 1936, at the age of 15, Swados enrolled at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he won a Hopwood Award for creative writing.

A graduate of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, Felice had married American historian Richard Hofstadter in 1936 and was working as an editor at Time magazine by 1940.

"His career really began with the publication, in Contemporary, the literary quarterly at the University of Michigan, of a short story, 'The Amateurs.' Written when Swados was just 16, 'The Amateurs' was reprinted in The Best Short Stories of 1938, where it appeared alongside stories by Robert Penn Warren, John Steinbeck, Eudora Welty, John Cheever and Mark Schorer."

Following his university graduation in 1940, Swados returned to Buffalo, where he worked as a riveter at defense contractor Bell Aircraft, passed through a brief first marriage and, following his sister, moved to New York City, where he took another factory job at the bustling Brewster Aviation plant in Long Island City, just across the East River from Manhattan.

Though he had already begun distancing himself from the Trotskyist organization by the beginning of the 1940s, Swados remained committed to principles of democratic socialism—exclusive of any party structure—and thought of himself as an independent radical for the rest of his life.

"Despite his own drift away from the revolutionary expectations of his youth, much that would remain central to Swados's worldview was formed in these politically charged years of factory employment in the early 1940s."

Dissatisfied with its reception among friends and colleagues whose opinions he valued, and unable to place it with a publisher at that time, Swados set the work aside shortly after its creation in the 1940s.

House of Fury, a novel by Felice Swados, was published in 1941.

Serving as a radio operator, Swados joined the United States Merchant Marine in 1943.

"His wartime service took him to the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the North Atlantic, the South Pacific and to various ports of call on five continents."

Those peripatetic experiences formed the basis for his first novel, The Unknown Constellations.

After giving birth to her son Dan in 1943, Felice died of cancer in 1945 at age 29.

Apart from the profound impact her death had on him, Swados, driven by his deep love for Felice and for her idealism, was more than ever determined to make his way as a writer.

In 1946, as he continued to launch his writing career, Swados married Bette Beller, with whom he had three children—son Marco in 1947, daughter Felice in 1949, who was named after Swados's late sister, and son Robin in 1953.

During this period, Swados worked in several public relations jobs often having to do with fundraising initiatives on behalf of the nascent State of Israel.

He found the office work frustrating, though, drawing as it did on many of the working hours and on many of the skills Swados wished to apply toward his own writing.

By the early 1950s, Swados and his family had moved from Brooklyn Heights to Greenwich Village in Manhattan, finally buying a home in then-rural Rockland County, New York, 25 miles north of New York City.

Beginning in the mid-1950s, Swados's Rockland County life with Bette and his children was marked by renewed and burgeoning friendships with fellow residents from the arts and the professions.

Perhaps the most profound of Swados's personal and professional relationships, though, was with his West Nyack, New York, neighbor, the sociologist, writer and Columbia University professor C. Wright Mills, whom Swados had met through Richard Hofstadter.

Mills and Swados not only worked side by side on construction projects at one another's homes, but critiqued—sometimes passionately—one another's works in progress.

Multi-hour discussions on politics and contemporary American culture characterized their relationship; the two frequently disagreed politically, most notably on the nature of the Castro revolution in Cuba.

Their mutual friend, writer Dan Wakefield, observed that Swados's short stories "dramatized concerns such as Mills addressed in White Collar, like the threat to individual freedom from new technology and corporate conformity. . . . More than any other writer I knew, C. Wright Mills's friend and neighbor Harvey Swados embodied the search to live and do his work in a commercial world and maintain his commitment as an artist."

Beginning in the late 1950s, in addition to his literary and journalistic work, Swados began teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, where writer Grace Paley was among his colleagues.

The family's residency in Rockland was punctuated by sojourns to the South of France and the Midwest and West Coast of the United States.

The semitropical setting became a much-loved second home to Swados—one to which he and his family returned for three one-year periods between the mid-1950s and the late 1960s.

On the commuter train between Rockland and Weehawken, New Jersey, on his way to and from his midtown Manhattan office job, Swados often did his own work, assembling his thoughts and writing his first published novel, Out Went the Candle, which was released in 1955.

Through the generosity of Rockland County friends who owned a modest villa there, Swados and his family resided, from 1955 to 1956, in the medieval Cote D'Azur village of Cagnes-sur-Mer, midway between Cannes and Nice.

Returning to Rockland County from France in 1956, and unwilling to return to his marketing and public relations paychecks, Swados opted for a job at the newly constructed Ford Motor Company assembly plant in Mahwah, New Jersey.

In his introduction to the University of Illinois Press edition of On the Line, Nelson Lichtenstein wrote, "When Swados showed up at the Mahwah plant in February 1956, the personnel man was glad to see that he had had some blue collar work experience, but he also found his job application strangely full of blank spots. When asked what he had been doing, Swados dodged: 'Writing novels in the South of France.' This little joke seemed to satisfy, so he was promptly assigned to the assembly line as a metal finisher, the same job he had mastered in the early 1940s when working in Buffalo."

Several years later, Lichtenstein wrote, Swados recounted his thoughts about having returned to the factory floor, rather than to an office, to earn a living.

His experiences there formed the basis of his 1957 book of related short stories, On the Line.

Experiences and friendships with the political group's adherents "he would later describe in Standing Fast, his 1970 novel that sympathetically recorded the exhilaration and despair of his political generation as it moved from the radical hopes of the late 1930s to a kind of acquiescent liberalism in the 1950s and 1960s."

Its posthumous publication by the University of Illinois Press in 1995 served as a revelation into the concerns and social issues that were later to engage him throughout his working life.