Lee Baxandall

Lee Raymond Baxandall (January 26, 1935 – November 28, 2008) was an American writer, translator, editor, and activist. He was first known for his New Left engagement with cultural topics and then as a leader of the naturist movement.

Baxandall was born and raised in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. He attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he obtained a B.A. (1957) and M.A. (1958) in English, studied comparative literature at the doctoral level, and became one of the editors of Studies on the Left, a New Left intellectual journal known for its free-wheeling qualities. In 1960, Baxandall traveled to revolutionary Cuba. In 1962, he married Rosalyn Fraad; she would become an early women's liberation activist and they would have a son, Phineas. Living in New York City from 1962 to 1977, they were active in the movement to end the Vietnam War.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Baxandall demonstrated a strong interest in the relationship between culture, particularly theatre, and radicalism. He translated plays by Peter Weiss and Bertolt Brecht, edited a collection of writings by the German social critic and psychologist Wilhelm Reich, compiled an annotated bibliography on Marxism and aesthetics, and wrote numerous essays on major literary figures, including Bertolt Brecht and Franz Kafka. In 1965 he gave lectures at the Free University of New York on 'Marxist approaches to the Avant-Garde Arts. Baxandall also wrote plays. His Hiroshima Requiem about the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan was put to music by Leonard Lehrman and performed in 1990. His play Potsy which was chiefly a monolog in an outhouse, was also performed, as was his play Claws of the Eagle − Claws of the Jaguar, which he wrote in 1967.

...
Wikipedia