SOURCE: "Abraham Cahan: Realism and the Early Stories," in MJS: Annual VII, edited by Joseph C. Landis, Vol. 7, No. 4, 1990, pp. 5-18.

In the following essay, Walden discusses Cahan's influence on Jewish-American culture in the early twentieth century and its reflection in his early stories.

Almost from his first days in America, Abraham Cahan was determined to be a man of letters. He had been influenced by pre-Marxian socialists, by Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? and by Nekrassov's Who Lives Well in Russia?, so it's not surprising that he was concerned at first solely with the social component of literature. Literature had to be didactic, it had to point a lesson, it had to instruct. Thus when he discovered Herbert Spencer, and when he translated Marx, Darwin, and Spencer for Di Zukunft, he felt he had stumbled on a key to the philosophical materialism that gripped him.

Gradually...