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Monday Aug. 24, 1970 Dear Jack -

  Browsing through the local library, I ran across a copy of David Madden's, Proletarian Writers of the Thirties.
   I felt several twinges of nostalgia in going through it.
  The problem that faces a young student of the period today is how to get his hands on the material of the time.
  Instances of reprint are rare and unusual as you well know.
  It took me several years to gather together the fourteen volumes of the great social Novel by Jules Romains:  Men of Good Will.  The great mass of ephemeral bits and pieces, pamphlets and magazines dissapear [sic] irretrievably down the drain of history.
  Books like your, The Disinherited and Roth's Call It Sleep have a survival value that transcends all categories.
  I was struck by your contribution to Madden's book because I had just finished reading The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters by Gross in which he coupled Cantwell and Conroy as archetypes of their period.  Gross deals with the English belle lettrists but manages a few words for that forgotten young eccentric Christopher Caudwell.   I once possessed Illusion and Reality but now I have only a battered copy of Studies in a Dying Culture.
    The problem with literature that deals with the underdogs is that those who are