V.J. Jerome

Victor Jeremy Jerome (1896–1965) was a Polish-American communist writer and editor. He is best remembered as a Marxist cultural essayist and as the long-time editor of the theoretical journal of the Communist Party USA.

Jerome Isaac Romain, better known by the pseudonym "Victor Jeremy Jerome," was born in Strykov, Poland, in 1896. He immigrated to New York City in 1915 and attended City College of New York.

Following graduation, he worked was a bookkeeper for the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union in the early 1920s.

In 1924, Jerome joined the Communist Party, and in 1925, he married Rose Pastor Stokes. He returned to college and in 1930, he received a Bachelor of Science degree from New York University. After Stoke's death in 1933, Jerome moved to Hollywood for a year to raise money for the Spanish Loyalists. Returning to New York in 1935, Jerome became editor of The Communist, which later became Political Affairs, and he served in that position until 1955. In 1937, he married Alice Hamburger.

Jerome was among the cultural spokesmen of the Communist Party and rose in the party hierarchy in the mid-1930s .

Between 1935 and 1965, Jerome wrote constantly. He wrote two autobiographical novels, A Lantern for Jeremy (released during the "Foley Square Trials" in 1952), and its sequel, The Paper Bridge (published posthumously in 1966). He also published a collection of vignettes, Unstill Waters (1964).

A prolific writer, he turned out short stories, plays, and literary, and art criticism. He is best known, however, for his political and cultural essats like "The Intellectuals and the War" (1940), "The Negro in Hollywood Films" (1950), and "Culture in a Changing World" (1948).

He was prosecuted and convicted under the Smith Act for committing the "overt act" of writing a pamphlet, Grasp the Weapon of Culture, which Jerome presented as a report to the Communist Party. He was indicted with 16 other Communist leaders in 1951. During a nine-month trial in New York's Foley Square Courthouse, he passed the long hours in court writing poetry and reading page proofs of A Lantern for Jeremy. He was convicted and sentenced in 1953 to three years at Lewisburg Penitentiary, which he served between 1954 and 1957.

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