The Anvil and Jack Conroy

The Anvil celebrated the new "worker-writer" that critics such as Mike Gold championed. Started and edited by Jack Conroy, himself a worker-writer, the magazine incurred continual financial shortcomings, and was eventually joined with The Partisan Review, the official organ of the New York John Reed Club.

Jack Conroy's novel The Disinherited follows Larry Donovan through his early years in a mining camp, through the tumultuous years of the First World War, to the Great Depression, as he tries to get work wherever he can find it despite the exploitative conditions of that work.

Conroy was involved in many of the proletarian projects of the thirties, including Unrest 1931, an anthology of radical poetry (cover image from the University of Tulsa).

More information on both Conroy and The Anvil to come.

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