Waldo Frank, author of twelve published novels and several social histories as well as a large number of literary and political articles, was considered by some in the early 1920s to be a writer destined for a dominant position in American letters. That destiny, however, was not to be fulfilled, and over the years most of Frank's books have gone out of print. Still, as he himself said, "there are elements of truth, elements of true forms of human experience, in my books ... which must carry over in the continuity of Western civilization." In this sense, according to Paul Carter, "Waldo Frank should be heard; for his spiritual vitality might inspire the kind of creativity which, in a dying culture, can be revolutionary."

Born of well-to-do Jewish parents in Long Branch, New Jersey, Frank was, even as a child, somewhat of a revolutionary. An iconoclast by nature, he...