The Pull of Communist Culture The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2018, vii – 373 pp. $50 Hardcover In this quite readable and accessible study, Milton Cohen describes Communist Party efforts to establish relationships with three major American writers of the 1930s – John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, and Ernest Hemingway. Of the three, only Richard Wright became a regular, though conflicted, Party member. Steinbeck and Hemingway, up to the late thirties, declined the Party’s advances. By the late 1930s the American Communist Party had achieved its greatest influence in American society. The Depression and the rise of aggressive fascism in Europe and Asia coincided with a revised Party line. Moscow directed its global affiliates to abandon class struggle and anti-capitalist rhetoric and align themselves with liberal and socialist parties, excluding those who disputed the CP’s politics, including Trotskyists, in a “Popular Front” to fight international fascism. Central to this new tactic was the cultivation of left-leaning intellectuals and those in the popular arts.