Great writers do not always emerge from the most revolutionary class, the working class. Great writers emerge because they are willing to be truthful, honest, and disciplined with their craft. However, this does not mean that writers whose fathers and mothers are workers cannot produce great literature. We only have to look back at the early years of the Russian Revolution and take notice of universal novelists and poets like Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Sergei Yessenin. All of them also suffered much because of their independence of mind and creative efforts. Gorky died under suspicious circumstances, supposedly at the hands of political forces who opposed him, while the other two Russian poets died young by suicide.

I will not here attempt to give credence to the lie that only those writers are, “true sons and daughters” of the proletariat, and therefore entitled to wear the mantel of 'proletarian writer' whose concern is to only write about the “struggling masses.” I am a writer who happens to come from a working-class family, but I was also trained in the art of writing in a progressive, middle-class high school, and later in university-level creative writing programs. I have discovered the authors I have come to know outside of my middle-class education from my own reading experiences, starting at the age of ten, when I read Tolstoy's War And Peace. The reason I read that book was not because I was a prodigy, but because my father had been killed by lightning while working as a crew boss of migrant workers in the fields of Texas. Therefore my interest in literature was not a class-conscious endeavor, but a way to seek answers to some of life's most chilling questions: Why do we live, and why do we die the way we die?

I would like to stress that my early interest in understanding the complexities of life and death by quoting the Russian novelist and poet, Ilya Ehrenburg, who wrote, 'Contrary to the opinion held in the West, the writer cannot be a spectator of life's comedy and drama; he must take part in it.'

Hemingway put it more harshly, but no less frankly, when he wrote to a friend in 1932: Those little punks who have never seen men street-fighting, let alone a revolution, writing and saying how can you be indifferent to great political events, etc. etc.

I refer to an outfit in, I believe, Davenport, Iowa. Listen—they never even heard of the events that produced the heat of rage, hatred indignation, and disillusion that formed or forged what they call indifference. Now they want you to swallow communism as though it were an elder boys Y.M.C.A. conference, or as though we were patriots together.' As a young woman artist-friend of mine said, 'Great writers don't change the world, people in general do.' We need to ask the question, what does working-class literature contribute to world literature in general?

In the anthology American Working-Class Literature (Oxford University Press) it states in the introduction that 'Working-class literature has use-value as protest, mourning, celebration, affirmation, testimony, call to action, and transformation. At its best, it becomes a form of cultural 'commons.'' If I correctly understand what the editors mean by 'commons,' it is creative work that affects an entire community, if not a whole nation. For the reactionary element in society, that term 'commons' or common refers to the lack of taste or refinement that is supposedly typical of the so-called lower classes, hence, vulgar.

So, how does the craft of the writer stand in relationship to his or her class origins? Are great novels and poetry only written by a select few, or do the works we read become a part the world community, regardless of whether the work is an account of a working person’s life, a description of a major war, or anything else?

In American Working-Class Literature anthology there is a poignant short story by the American poet, Bill Witherup, called 'Mother Witherup’s Top Secret Cherry Pie,” which recalls to me the 'swallowing' problem that Ernest Hemingway had with force-fed communist ideological mannerism in literature or in life's daily politics. There is no spoon-feeding in the way the poet Bill Witherup describes the working-class living conditions of his mother and father who are nearing the end of their lives, but who maintain their dignity through it all. His father is dying of cancer, after working for many years at an nuclear power plant. Bill's mother, Rose, keeps the retirement atmosphere sweet by making great desserts for the whole family, especially her cherry pie, which eventually leads to a catering business to give the family extra income. However, she makes one serious mistake in her long life, by advertising about her pies in a local newspaper in Hanford, Washington, where the atomic factory is located, and where military intelligence forbade workers to in any way expose the fact that they were engaged in the production of atomic bombs. Eventually, a kind, but stern military intelligence officer comes to Bill's mother's home to inform her that her advertising must stop – 'classified.' Security, you know – we wouldn't want the Axis to find out what we are up to here, would we?'

The subtle beauty in Witherup's story is not the creation of the atomic bomb that was so central to his father's life, but the creative richness in the everyday events of his family and friends. Here we might ask what is myth and what is genuine in American history, atomic bombs or great cherry pies, George Washington the man, or the myth of the boy who cut down the cherry tree? Perhaps in America and American history as well, a little reality combined with a lot of myth is about all that we can swallow.

American writers have yet to reach the standards of universal literature in the way, for instance, the way in which Balzac wrote about the human condition. Although he did not come from the French working class, and although his politics were aligned with the ancient French nobility prior to the French Revolution, he was able to transcend his class prejudices and make his characters come alive in that ever changing, nascent atmosphere called Paris. Yet, we do have writers such as Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck, who, although confused at times about their own class interests, nevertheless, wrote classics that recognized the difference between the arrogance and naivete of the middle class regarding life and art, and the lives of working-class people, who know life's harshness and the heroic, bitter struggle that accompanies it.

In another work by Hemingway, By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, an anthology of his newspaper writings, he said unapologetically, 'don't let them suck you in to start writing about the proletariat, if you don't come from the proletariat, just to please the recently politically enlightened critics. In a little while these critics will be something else… Write about what you know and write truly and tell them all where they can place it…. Books should be about the people you know, that you love and hate, not about the people you study up about.' Although Hemingway was not an historian, he wrote a great hisotrical novel about the Spanish Civil War called For Whom the Bells Toll. Engels wrote, 'World history is surely the greatest of poets.' Hemingway did not have the education to be an historian but surely knew a great deal about the people he wrote of, since he was greatly devoted to the Spanish people and their just cause during the struggle against Franco. History, including the history of world literature, gives credence to those writers, proletariat in origin or not, who write with genuine concern about the events that shape human life. In our times, we have been fortunate to have two universal writers from humble workers' families, Pablo Neruda and José Saramago who have given us poetry and novels about people whose lives are not only proletarian in background, but complex and symbolic of the overall human condition.

It was with great hesitation that I wrote this essay, because I have never been comfortable with the political correctness that is to be found in both the left and right-wing American literary camps. There is an historical strand in America that has always smacked of self-righteousness, vulgar puritanism, and Anglo-American cultural imperialism, that is both boorish and fascist in its political roots. It would be both naive and foolish of me to think that by putting forth my views on the craft of the writer and his class allegiances that I will awaken the American people, let alone what few progressive intellectuals that we have in the United States, to the idea that we need to write about the people who compose the deeper fabric of this nation, and the working class as a whole.

I remember another passage from Ehrenburg in his essay, 'The Writer and His Craft,” in which intellectuals in America and Western Europe lamented to him that the standards of literature in their countries 'had dropped,' and that it was only the military man, the diplomat, and the politician who counted. In the United States, as we know, there is a myth that literature is for everyone, and that our neo-Athenian democracy allows everyone to read just what they want to. Tell that to a tired worker; offer that to the American soldier who lives by the minute in Iraq or Afghanistan. Better yet mouth these words over the grave of Ernest Hemingway who wrote his best works in Cuba and returned to America to die.