Walt Carmon as a Soviet Literary Emissary to the USA

Walt Carmon (1894–1968), American critic and magazine editor, started his career in the 1920s in American leftist periodicals Soviet Russia Pictorial, Daily Worker, Labor Defender, and in 1929 became a managing editor for the Marxist weekly New Masses. As an experienced editor, journalist and committed Communist he was invited to Moscow and spent five years there working for the English edition of International Literature magazine, Moscow Daily News and Soviet Travel. He regularly published his own articles in the Soviet press, helped to co-opt American writers, critics and journalists. Having returned to the USA in 1936 Carmon for about ten years was keeping his position of a Soviet literary emissary in America. His articles continued to appear in Soviet periodicals, he maintained regular correspondence with Soviet literary institutions, reported news, received instructions and carried out numerous missions mostly as an intermediary in Soviet-American literary contacts. He was acquainted with many American writers, including such outstanding figures as John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and his Soviet colleagues used Carmon as a communication channel with them. He provided International Literature editorial office and the Foreign Commission of the Soviet Writers’ Union with lots of materials (American books, magazines, journal and newspaper clips). Collaboration with Walt Carmon ceased in late 1940s due to the Cold War that set new milestones for change, while Carmon remained a midwestern radical from the red thirties and his services were no longer in demand in the postwar USSR. The paper reconstructs the history of Carmon’s collaboration with his Soviet colleagues on the basis of published and unpublished materials stored in Russian archives and especially his extensive Soviet correspondence – a rich source for studies in literary history.