SOURCE: Oliver, Lawrence J. “Writing from the Right during the ‘Red Decade’: Thomas Dixon's Attack on W. E. B. DuBois and James Weldon Johnson in The Flaming Sword.” American Literature 70, no. 1 (March 1998): 131-52.

In the following essay, Oliver states that Dixon's later novel The Flaming Sword appealed to the lowest passions of white readers by allying black militants with communists in its “cultural work” of preserving white hegemony.

In his contribution to Radical Revisions: Rereading 1930s Culture (1996), Alan Wald observes that the surge of recent scholarship on American culture during the 1930s aims to “complicate and contextualize all dimensions, the known and the unknown, of that stunning, mystifying and semimythical decade in United States cultural life.”¹ Much of the new literary scholarship on the 1930s focuses on writers ignored or glossed over in Daniel Aaron's groundbreaking Writers on the Left (1961). The essays forming Radical Revisions, for example, center...