Word: proletarian
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...Sean O'Casey (The Plough and the Stars, Juno and the Paycock) summarized what much of the Irish press said of him and his works. Absolutely correct, agrees O'Casey-and proud of it. He promises to spend his whole life wearing "the tattered badge of [his proletarian] tribe . . . soiled with the diseased sweat of the tenements...
Through all the hullabaloo moves O'Casey himself, an ex-laborer who burns with a hot, proletarian fire. He is poor as a church mouse and still, at 35, such "innocent gaum" (dumbbell) that when he gets a check for one of his first plays he doesn't know how to go about cashing it. But he is sustained by wonderful dreams and illusions in which he sees Ireland peopled by "golden boys" who wander through lanes "canopied by the sly innocence of the woodbine's dangling stems," while adoring lasses stroke "the faded, maybe bloodstained, cloth...
...innocent gaum O'Casey woke up with a bump to find that most people were clay after all. When his proletarian plays were staged by Dublin's Abbey Theater, many critics hissed maliciously and poets looked nervously the other way. Even pioneers, O'Casey discovered, fear public opinion; even democrats get a kick out of wearing striped pants and top hats; even noble esthetes enjoy walking with one foot in the gutter. Sean was shocked to find that stately, plump Oliver St. John Gogarty surreptitiously read whodunits ; that refined Lady Gregory reveled...
...shook China with fear and hope. It gave Mao the simple answers he was looking for. Excitedly, he traveled between Changsha, Peking and Shanghai, doing odd jobs and organizing workers and students. In Peking he worked as a librarian and for the first time he sensed himself a proletarian. "I stayed in . . . a little room which held seven other peopie," he said. "I used to have to warn people on each side of me when I wanted to turn over . . ." He read the Communist Manifesto...
...depression '30s, Hungary-born Edward Newhouse wrote a leftish novel, You Can't Sleep Here, that led one critic to hail him as "the proletarian Hemingway." Two years later, his story of a Communist organizer (This Is Your Day) further established his skill-and his slant. He had been a contributor to the New Masses, but while his left hand was busy with ideological chores, his right was making a reputation for him with short stories in The New Yorker...