You Can't Sleep Here by Newhouse, Edward - (c.1934)

New York: The Macaulay Company. Good. (c.1934). First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [worn but intact copy, soiling to covers, bumping and fraying at corners and spine ends, moderate darkening/discoloration to spine; internally clean, hinges holding well]. The first of two proletarian novels by this Hungarian-born writer. This one, chronicling the conversion of a young newspaperman to communism, earned him a lot of attention (critic John Chamberlain tagged him "the proletarian Hemingway"); the next ("This is Your Day," published in 1937) about a group of young radicals in Manhattan, further enhanced his leftist literary credentials. However, the author's day job – on the staff of The New Yorker, to which he contributed numerous short stories – ultimately pulled him in the other direction, and by the time he got around to publishing his third novel ("The Hollow of the Wave") in 1949, he had broken with the Communist Party, and used that book was a vehicle for repudiating its philosophies. His prole works (either in accord with his wishes, or because the subject matter was way out of fashion in the postwar era) were never issued in paperback, and have fallen into obscurity, right alongside the author himself. Cited in Rideout (The Radical Novel in the United States); Hanna 2627. .