Simply to Be Americans? Literary Radicals Confront Monopoly Capitalism, 1885-1938 by Joel Wendland-Liu

Wendland-Liu deftly navigates decades of radical literary figures who struggled with the question of “what is an American?” during a defining era of American monopoly capitalism, imperialism, and racial and class subjugation. A work of theory, literary analysis, history, and social commentary, “Simply to Be Americans?” re-imagines American literary icons while introducing audiences to lesser-known authors and thinkers who, undaunted, forged a revolutionary social tradition that continues to demand more of our shared cultural identity of “American.” “Simply to Be Americans?” is an important addition to revolutionary’s library.

Prof. Dr. Melissa Ford

Slippery Rock University

“Simply to Be Americans?” is a wide-ranging and sensitive investigation of different strands of U.S. literary radicalism that critiqued monopoly capitalism through the adoption or rejection of different modes of being "American" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wendland-Liu excels in close readings that give new insights into texts that we thought we knew and put those texts in discussion with others we may not have considered before.

Prof. Dr. James Smethurst

W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies

University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Joel Wendland-Liu picks up the gauntlet thrown down by W.E.B. DuBois in the ambitious cultural history, “Simply to Be Americans?”. DuBois posed the question at an NAACP dinner in 1926 of whether his audience aspired simply to be Americans or sought a more emancipatory future. DuBois answered the question with a resounding no, to be simply American on its terms would never suffice. “’America,’” as Wendland-Liu describes, “configured as a collectivity composed of white, racially pure human beings, although fraught with the presence of non-beings, substantiates, mystifies, and fetishizes racial whiteness as a metonym for the perfectible nation, state power, and ‘bad faith’ required by 100% Americanism” […]

Wendland-Liu places in conversation a wide range of radical authors and their literary production between 1885 and 1938 to develop the deeper, and more difficult answer to DuBois’s question. […]

Each chapter skillfully weaves together close readings of several authors on key themes of fugitivity, anti-patriarchy, anti-capitalism, anti-Black and anti-immigrant racism. […]

The answers to DuBois’s challenge from 1926 are still resonant one hundred years later. […]

These are all current debates and answers, ones we join in today’s politics. […]

[Extract from book review at the journal ‘Socialism and Democracy’, Vol. 40, No. 2, 174–177. (Published online on 18 Aug 2026). Reviewer: Elisabeth Armstrong (Smith College, Northampton, MA). https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2026.2710485]