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Max Eastman

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Author

The Resume

    (January 4, 1883-March 25, 1969)
    Born in Canandaigua, New York
    Author/editor/literary critic/poet
    Editor for 'The Masses' (1913-17), 'The Liberator' (1919-24) and 'Reader's Digest' (1941-69)
    Wrote 'Enjoyment of Poetry' (1913), 'Child of the Amazons and Other Poems' (1913), 'Journalism Versus Art' (1916), 'Colors of Life: Poems and Songs and Sonnets' (1918), 'The Sense of Humor' (1921), 'Since Lenin Died' (1925), 'Art and the Life of Action' (1934), 'Enjoyment of Laughter' (1936), 'Stalin's Russia and the Crisis in Socialism' (1939), 'Heroes I Have Known' (1942), 'Enjoyment of Living' (1948), 'Reflections on the Failure of Socialism' (1955), 'Great Companions: Critical Memoirs of Some Famous Friends' (1959) and 'Love and Revolution: My Journey Through an Epoch' (1964)

Why he might be annoying:

    After completing all the requirements for a doctoral degree, he refused to accept it and withdrew from Columbia University instead.
    He left his wife and child for an actress.
    He went from being a socialist who supported the Russian Revolution to a conservative who supported Joseph McCarthy.
    He and Ernest Hemingway got into a wrestling match at the office of their mutual editor, Maxwell Perkins. (Both authors insisted that they had won the bout.)
    He wrote, 'Although I do nothing, I always talk politics like a man of action, and that makes it necessary at least to go on talking.'

Why he might not be annoying:

    During World War I, he was twice tried and acquitted of violating the Sedition Act; the government's prosecution of dissenters led him to write 'You can't even collect your thoughts without getting arrested for unlawful assembly.'
    After a fact-finding tour of the Soviet Union (1922-24), he ticked off leftists by describing conditions for artists and political activists and by revealing Lenin's Testament, which urged that Stalin be removed from power.
    He wrote that the Russian Revolution 'rather than producing freedom, produced the most perfect tyranny in all history.'
    He criticized authors like James Joyce for fostering a 'Cult of Unintelligibility.'

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    For 2024, as of last weekly ranking, Out of 1 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2023, Out of 1 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 4 Votes: 75.00% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 6 Votes: 83.33% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 3 Votes: 33.33% Annoying
    In 2018, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2017, Out of 10 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2016, Out of 3 Votes: 33.33% Annoying
    In 2015, Out of 13 Votes: 53.85% Annoying
    In 2014, Out of 12 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2013, Out of 11 Votes: 54.55% Annoying
    In 2012, Out of 14 Votes: 57.14% Annoying
    In 2011, Out of 81 Votes: 46.91% Annoying