Phillip Bonosky
Phillip Bonosky (March 7, 1916 – March 2, 2013) was an American novelist, journalist, and labor activist. A lifelong Communist, he wrote the coming-of-age novel Burning Valley and worked as cultural editor and Moscow correspondent for the Daily World. Bonosky was one of the first U.S. journalists to visit communist China and one of the few to interview Vietnamese revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh.[1]
Background
Bonosky was born in 1916 in
Early career
As an adolescent he worked in the Duquesne Steel Works, but lost his job in the Great Depression and left home to find work. Norman Markowitz writes, "Bonosky joined large numbers of unemployed youth to ride the rails in the early 1930s, and eventually found himself in Washington, DC, living in a warehouse for transients that the early Roosevelt administration had provided."[3]
Social activism
While in
Friend and, for a time, fellow Communist Party member Angela Davis quoted Bonosky as giving his view of the period. He said that the 1930s were a "watershed in the American democratic tradition. It is a period which will continue to serve both the present and the future as a reminder and an example of how an aroused people, led and spurred on by the working-class, can change the entire complexion of the culture of a nation."[6]
In 1948, Bonosky began a lifelong friendship with the painter Alice Neel, detailed in the 2007 documentary film Alice Neel and in the Neel biography Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty by Phoebe Hoban. Hoban describes the first meeting between Bonosky and Neel: "Bonosky first met Neel at the offices of Masses & Mainstream, where he was an editor (as was Mike Gold). Neel asked him to sit for a portrait, and in early March 1948, he came up to her apartment every afternoon for a week, posing between one and four." Bonosky later organized an exhibition of Neel's paintings in Moscow.[7]
Death
Bonosky died age 96 on March 2, 2013, in
Works
Bonosky published his first novel, Burning Valley, in 1953, and contributed to the literary journal Masses & Mainstream throughout the 1950s. His second novel, The Magic Fern, was published in 1960. In the 1960s, Bonosky interviewed Vietnamese president Ho Chi Minh[8] and became cultural editor for the Communist Party newspaper Daily World. He interviewed Afghan leaders in the 1980s, and was one of the first Western journalists to visit Cambodia after the removal of the Khmer Rouge. He has published several collections of his work, including Beyond the Borders of Myth: From Vilnius to Hanoi (1967), Afghanistan: Washington’s Secret War (1985), Devils in Amber: The Baltics (1992. He published a collection of short stories, A Bird in Her Hair, in 1987.
His literary agent was Maxim Lieber.[9]
- Books
- Burning Valley (1953)
- The Magic Fern (1960
- Beyond the Borders of Myth: From Vilnius to Hanoi (1967)
- Afghanistan: Washington’s Secret War (1985)
- A Bird in Her Hair (1987))
- Devils in Amber: The Baltics (1992)
References
- ^ Rosenberg, Daniel. "Phillip Bonosky, 1916–2013, chronicled life and politics from Pittsburgh to Phnom Penh". People's World. Retrieved February 27, 2014.
- ISBN 978-0-312-60748-7.
- ^ Markowitz, Norman. "A Profile of Philip Bonosky, Proletarian Novelist". Political Affairs. Retrieved March 11, 2014.
- ISBN 0700613110.
- ^ "Phillip Thomas Bonosky Obituary". The New York Times. Retrieved February 27, 2014.
- ISBN 0679771263.
- ISBN 978-0-312-60748-7.
- ISBN 978-0-7326-1153-8.
- ^ "Interlocking Subversion in Government Departments". U.S. Government Printing Office. 24 September 1954. pp. xviii. Retrieved 27 September 2016.
- ^ Bonosky, Phillip. Burning Valley. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. p. Jacket.