Meet me on the Barricades

Charles Yale Harrison (1898-1954) was an author, activist, and editor. Harrison born in Philadelphia and raised in a Jewish family in Montreal. He served in World War One, an experience that would influence much of his subsequent fiction. A dedicated fellow traveller, Harrison moved from Montreal to New York in the 1920s, where he worked on the staff of the Communist Party of America (CPUSA)-led magazine New Masses alongside outspoken literary critics of proletarian literature such as Mike Gold. He was also a founding member of one of a series of John Reed Clubs, established in 1929 in an attempt to create a large forum for leftist writers. Drawing on his own service in the First World War, he published Generals Die in Bed (1930), a scathingly anti-war novel about the horrors of trench warfare. The novel was well received, and was followed by the novels A Child is Born (1931), There are Victories (1933), Meet Me on the Barricades (1938), and Nobody’s Fool (1948). He also authored a biography of the American socialist lawyer Clarence Darrow (1931), and the self-help book Thank God For My Heart Attack (1949).

Bart Vautour is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie University. His research examines Canadian cultural production of the twentieth century with a focus on modernism, politics, poetics, and editing. He is co-editor (with Erin Wunker, Travis V. Mason, and Christl Verduyn) of Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics and (with Vanessa Lent and Dean Irvine) Making Canada New: Editing, Modernism, and Digital Media. He is also editor of a scholarly edition of Ted Allan’s Spanish Civil War novel, This Time a Better Earth (1939) from University of Ottawa Press. He is co-director of a multi-phase archival project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, “Canada and the Spanish Civil War.”