Harvey Swados
| Harvey Swados | |
|---|---|
| Born | October 28, 1920 Buffalo, New York |
| Died | December 11, 1972 Chesterfield, Massachusetts |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Nationality | American |
| Period | 20th century |
| Genre | Naturalism |
| Subject | Contemporary life |
Harvey Swados (October 28, 1920 – December 11, 1972) was an American social critic and author of novels, short stories, essays and journalism.
Born in Buffalo, New York, Harvey Swados was the son of Aaron Meyer Swados, a physician, and Rebecca (Bluestone) Swados, a musician and artist whose father was a pioneer Zionist. Both parents' backgrounds were European Jewish. Almost uniformly, uncles, aunts and cousins on both sides of his family were degreed professionals—doctors, dentists, lawyers—but Swados aspired from an early age to a writer's life.
Simultaneous with an upper-middle-class upbringing, Swados developed an acute awareness of his social surroundings. During his childhood and early adolescent years in Buffalo during the Great Depression, he often witnessed his father treating unemployed patients without charging a fee. In 1936, at the age of 15, Swados enrolled at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he won a Hopwood Award for creative writing.
"His career really began with the publication, in Contemporary, the literary quarterly at the University of Michigan, of a short story, 'The Amateurs.' Written when Swados was just 16, 'The Amateurs' was reprinted in The Best Short Stories of 1938, where it appeared alongside stories by Robert Penn Warren, John Steinbeck, Eudora Welty, John Cheever and Mark Schorer."
Strongly influenced by the political and social convictions of his sister Felice (who had many discussions at the Hunter Colony run by Margaret Lefranc), and while still an undergraduate, Swados also initiated during this period what was to become a lengthy relationship with the anti-Stalinist American Left and, by the late 1930s, had affiliated himself with the Leon Trotsky–inspired and Max Shachtman–led Workers Party (U.S.), whose adherents included novelist James T. Farrell and democratic socialist theorist, literary critic and social historian Irving Howe.
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