Victor Francis Calverton

Background

Victor Francis Calverton was born on June 25, 1900 in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. His original name was George Goetz, and he was the oldest of the three children of Charles and Ida Janette (Geiger) Goetz. Both parents were of German-American extraction; Calverton was always proud that one grandfather had been a radical refugee from the German Revolution of 1848.

Education

Brought up in middle-class surroundings the father was a merchant tailor Calverton went to public schools and in 1918 entered Johns Hopkins, where he majored in English, philosophy, and psychology, read widely in other disciplines, and received his A. B. in 1921.

Career

After a year of graduate work at Hopkins in psychology, he began teaching in the Baltimore public schools. Calverton had early been influenced toward radicalism by his father's denunciations of American imperialism in the Spanish-American War.

In 1923 he founded the Modern Quarterly, which he edited until his death, to provide a magazine "where writers with radical vision but literary interests could find a voice. " At this time he assumed the name of Victor Francis Calverton for fear that editing a revolutionary periodical under his real name would cost him his teaching job. From its beginning the Quarterly reflected the personality and attitudes of its editor. Primarily concerned with the application of Marxist principles to the social sciences and literature, it vigorously criticized the status quo; yet it revealed remarkable tolerance toward the varied opinions of its contributors. In his career as free-lance writer, Calverton published twelve books, two of them novels of ideas, and edited six others, three in collaboration with Samuel D. Schmalhausen, besides contributing frequently to many magazines. Influenced chiefly by Marx, Freud, and Henry Thomas Buckle, he discussed anthropology, sociology, psychology, politics, religion, and particularly history and literature. In his first book, The Newer Spirit (1925), he argued that all aspects of literary expression were determined by the class relationships resulting from the forces of production. Ultimately he was to reject this oversimplified interpretation of Marx and to hold that Marxism, though an essential historical method, was of little use in aesthetic evaluation. Other volumes--Sex Expression in Literature (1926), The Bankruptcy of Marriage (1928), and the symposium Sex in Civilization (1929)--revealed his concern in the later 1920's for uniting Marxism and psychoanalytic theory in an attack on current sexual taboos. By 1930 Calverton had moved to Greenwich Village and made a name for himself in the publishing world.

Meanwhile he made frequent lecture tours in the United States and abroad. In 1931 he opened the Modern Quarterly (from 1933 to 1938 published as the Modern Monthly) to Trotskyist and unaffiliated Marxist writers. His ideological independence was also shown, as was his love for extreme generalizations, in The Liberation of American Literature (1932), which interpreted American literature in terms of a struggle between the upper and lower levels of the middle class and pronounced our literature to be mature only now that a school of Marxist writers was arising. After publishing The Passing of the Gods (1934), which declared that science was replacing religion in men's minds, Calverton began a Marxist analysis of American history; The Awakening of America (1939) was the first volume in a projected trilogy designed to describe America's growth "in terms of the ruled instead of the rulers. " His final work, Where Angels Dared to Tread (1941), was a history of the Utopian colonies established in the United States.

He died in New York of pernicious anemia and was buried in Loudon Park Cemetery, Baltimore.

Achievements

• Calverton founded the Modern Quarterly, wrote 18 monographs and was editor of An Anthology of American Negro Literature (1929).

Works

More photos

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  • The Making of Society: An Outline of Sociology (The Modern Library)

    (We sell Rare, out-of-print, uncommon, & used BOOKS, PRINT...)

  • The Awakening of America

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • The Making of Man: An Outline of Anthropology (Modern Library)

    (1931 HARDCOVER)

  • The bankruptcy of marriage / V.F. Calverton
  • V.F. Calverton: Radical in the American Grain (Critical Perspectives on the Past) by Leonard Wilcox (1992-05-03)

  • book

Politics

At the age of eighteen he had been converted to socialism, and in the early 1920's he was drawn toward the Communist party, though he never became a member. Always an independent radical, he broke with the Communists in 1931, charging them with totalitarianism.

Personality

A stout, swarthy man, gregarious, filled with immense gusto, he entertained constantly, tried to know everyone connected with writing, and was admired by many friends for his encyclopedic knowledge, his zest for ideas, his genuine love of people, and his boundless energy.

Connections

Calverton's first marriage, which ended in divorce, was to Helen Letzer; in 1931 he married Nina Melville, who survived him. He had no children by either marriage.

Father:

Charles Goetz

Mother:

Ida Janette (Geiger) Goetz

Brother:

Charles Goetz, Jr.

1st wife:

Helen Letzer

2nd wife:

Nina Melville