Granville Hicks

Granville Hicks was born September 9, 1901, in Exeter, New Hampshire, to Frank Stevens and Carrie Weston (Horne) Hicks. He earned his A.B. and M.A. degrees from Harvard University. In 1925 he married Dorothy Dyer, with whom he had a daughter, Stephanie.

From 1925 to 1928 Hicks taught at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, as an instructor in biblical literature. He was an assistant professor of English at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1929–35) and a counselor in American civilization at Harvard (1938–39).

Hicks was a highly-influential Marxist literary critic in the 1930s who was well known for his involvement in a number of celebrated causes (including his well-publicized resignation from the Communist Party USA in 1939). He established his reputation as an important literary critic with the 1933 publication of The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature since the Civil War, a systematic history of American literature from a Marxist perspective.

In 1932, he voted for the Communist Party ticket and joined almost all the significant communist front groups in the 1930s. In 1934, Hicks joined the Communist Party itself and became editor of its cultural magazine, The New Masses.

In 1935, Hicks was dismissed from his teaching position at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which he claimed to be politically motivated although school officials denied it. He continued to teach at various institutions but devoted more and more of his time to writing. In 1936, Hicks was asked to co-write John Reed: The Making of a Revolutionary, a biography of radical journalist John Reed. Communist Party General Secretary Earl Browder pressured Hicks to remove several passages that reflected negatively on the Soviet Union, but in the end, the book was praised for its even-handed and unbiased presentation.

In 1939, in protest against the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Hicks resigned from the Communist Party. He attempted to organize an independent left-wing alternative organization but with little success. By 1940 he had entirely renounced communism and termed himself a democratic socialist. The same year he wrote an essay for The Nation, "The Blind Alley of Marxism." In the 1950s, Hicks testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee twice. In a 1951 essay in Commentary, he explained that communism "permits of no neutrality. The liquidation of neutrals is one of its specialties." Its aim is "brutal revolutionary totalitarianism."[1]

Hicks's seminal work, Small Town, based on his experiences in Grafton, New York, was published in 1946. For three years (1955–58), he taught novel writing at the New School for Social Research in New York. He was a visiting professor at New York University (1959), Syracuse University (1960), and Ohio University (1967–68). He was the director of the Yaddo artists' community beginning in 1942 and later served as its acting executive director. For 35 years (1930–65), he was the literary advisor to Macmillan Publishers.

Hicks died June 18, 1982 in Franklin Park, New Jersey.

In addition to his books, Hicks wrote a number of articles for various publications, including American Mercury, Saturday Review, Pacific Weekly, Antioch Review, Harper's, Sewanee Review, New York Times Book Review, The Bookman, Esquire, New Republic, and Nation. He also wrote the introduction to John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World (Modern Library (New York: Modern Library, 1935).

• Robert Joseph Bicker, Granville Hicks as an American Marxist Critic. PhD dissertation. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1973.
• Terry L. Long, Granville Hicks. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1981.
• Leah Levenson and Jerry Natterstad, Granville Hicks: The Intellectual in Mass Society. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993.

• Granville Hicks Papers at the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library
• Granville Hicks correspondence with Newton Arvin at the Mortimer Rare Book Collection, Smith College Special Collections