MAX EASTMAN (1947)

Poet, editor and leading radical before and after World War I and later a militant conservative.

Founder of the first men´s league for woman suffrage in 1910, Eastman edited and published The Masses, a radical political and literary periodical. Its editors were brought to trial twice in 1918 because of their editorial opposition to U.S. entrance into World War I, but both trials ended with divided juries. He then edited and published The Liberator, a similar magazine until 1922 when he travelled to Russia to study the Soviet regime.

He married Eliena Krylenko, a sister of the Soviet minister of justice but returned to the U.S. believing that the original purpose of the October Revolution had been destroyed by a corrupt governing group. In the 1920s and 1930s he wrote several books attacking developments in the Soviet Union: Since Lenin Died (1925); Artists in Uniform (1934); The End of Socialism in Russia (1937); and Stalin´s Russia and the Crisis in Socialism (1939).

From 1941 he was a roving editor for The Reader´s Digest, writing on almost anything that interested him. His many other books included Enjoyment of Poetry (23 editions 1913-48); Enjoyment of Laughter (1936); and two autobiographical works: Enjoyment of Living (1948) and Love and Revolution: My Journey Through an Epoch (1965).