Hicks, Granville (1901–82), born in New Hampshire, graduated from Harvard (1923), wrote
Eight Ways of Looking at Christianity (1926), and taught at Smith College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. A leading Communist critic and editor of
The New Masses, he wrote a Marxist interpretation of American literature since the Civil War,
The Great Tradition (1933). With John Stuart he wrote a biography of John Reed (1936), he was appointed a Fellow in U.S. History at Harvard (1938), and with Ella Winter he edited the
Letters of Lincoln Steffens (1938). In an autobiographical work,
I Like America (1938), he explained his position as a Communist critic of the contemporary scene.
Figures of Transition (1939), published the year he resigned from the Communist party, is a Marxist study of British literature at the end of the 19th century. His novels are
The First To Awaken (1940), written with Richard M. Bennett, about a New Hampshire man, anesthetized in 1940, who wakes a century later to find revolutionary social and industrial improvements;
Only One Storm (1942), about a New Englander who weathers a storm of intellectual doubt; and
Behold Trouble (1944), about a wartime conscientious objector.
Small Town (1946) is nonfiction, and
Where We Came Out (1954) describes the appeal of, and disillusionment with, communism. He wrote essays titled
Literary Horizons (1970) and collected his articles from
The New Masses (1974).
Part of the Truth (1965) is his autobiography.
