Proletarian Novelist, non fiction writer, and  Communist party activist Phil Bonosky passed away recently at the age of 97.  A Memorial to Phil, organized and directed by his family, was held last Sunday at the national headquarters of the CPUSA .  I am dedicating this pre May Day Marxist IQ to Phil and to all peoples artists and  defenders of working class culture everywhere.

1.       The English “Puritan Revolution,” the first successful bourgeois or capitalist revolution, could be seen most powerfully in

a.       The plays of William Shakespeare

b.      The epic poetry of John Milton

c.       The love poems of HenryVIII

d.      The Writings of Cotton Mather

2.       This lifelong socialist was and continues to be considered the most important playwright in the English language in the first half of the 20^th century

a.       Noel Coward

b.      Thornton Wilder

c.       George Bernard Shaw

d.      George S, Kaufman

3.        In The Iron Heel(1911) Socialist novelist Jack London  warned of

a.       a coming depression, which would lead to world revolution

b.      new foreign wars between the U.S. and Japan

c.       The establishment of a  brutal dictatorship of the monopolies, which would later be called in real life fascism

d.      A new civil war and the revival of the confederacy

4.       The Communist movement through the world attracted some of the most famous writers and artists.  Among those who at one time or another belonged to Communist parties through the world were

a.       The Spanish Painter Pablo Picasso

b.      The Irish Playwright Sean O’Casey

c.       The American Playwright Arthur Miller

d.      All of the Above

5.       Although anti-Communists accused Proletarian novelists of following the formulas of Soviet Socialist realism in a hackneyed way,  the novels of Phil Bonsoky,The Burning Valley  and  The Magic  Fern 

a.       show, in  their poetic use of language and their connection of man to nature, the distortion in this analysis

b.      show, in their accounts of heroic workers who triumph over evil capitalists, the accuracy of this analysis.

c.       Show that literature must be disconnected from history and politics

d.      Show a world of class struggle and oppression that modern capitalism in the U.S. has eliminated

Answers to the Marxist IQ for  April 13

1.c

2.d

3.d

d.d

5.c