MAX EASTMAN - AUTOGRAPH POEM SIGNED - HFSID 190093

MAX EASTMAN
Handwritten and signed copy of Eastman's poem Diogenes
Autograph poem signed "Max Eastman" in blue ink.3x4. Eastman's poem Diogenes. In full: "A hut and a tree/And a hill for me,/And a piece of a/weedy meadow-/I'll ask no thing/of God or King/But to clear away/his shadow." Eastman (1883-1969) was an American writer. Born in Canandaigua, New York, he settled in Manhattan's Greenwich Village and founded the Men's League for Women's Suffrage in 1910. He became an important figure in Greenwich Village and became editor of the socialist magazine The Masses in 1913. The magazine was forced to close in 1918 under the Espionage Act because it denounced United States participation in World War I, and Eastman stood trial, and was acquitted, twice under the Sedition Act of 1918. He traveled to the Soviet Union in 1923 to see how Marxism worked in practice. The trip drastically changed his views of the Soviet Union and, upon returning to the United States, wrote several essays that were critical of Stalinism. He retained his leftist ideas after returning to America, but had largely abandoned them by the 1940s. He became a roving editor for Reader's Digest in 1941 and wrote articles criticizing socialism and communism and supporting McCarthy's anti-communist crusade, culminating in Reflections on the Failure of Socialism in 1955. Lightly spotted. Writing is in thick blue ink but legible. "do" in "meadows" is smudged but legible. Otherwise in fine condition.