Matthew Holman is an associate lecturer in English at University College London. His first book, In Favor of One’s Time: Frank O’Hara and the American Century, is in preparation.
Jessica Mitford was born the child of aristocrats and the sister of fascists who celebrated the rise of Adolf Hitler. But she betrayed her class to become a communist, embedding herself in the life of the working class and railing against the powerful.
The writer Barbara Ehrenreich, who died earlier this month, believed in a humanistic Marxism. Nowhere was this conviction more on display than in her writings on the sexism and cruelty of America’s for-profit health care system.
Diane di Prima’s political poetry took on America’s oppressive power structures while her activism made her a target for the FBI. A new edition of her work shows that we are still fighting the same battles as di Prima.