Books by Paul Buhle

Wobblies!: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World

by Paul Buhle, Nicole Schulman

The stories of the hard-rock miners’ shooting wars, young Elizabeth Gurly Flynn (the “Rebel Girl” of contemporary sheet music), the first sit-down strikes and Free Speech fights, Emma Goldman and the struggle for birth control access, the Pageant for Paterson orchestrated in Madison Square Garden, bohemian radicals John Reed and Louise Bryant, field-hand revolts and lumber workers’ strikes, wartime witch hunts, government prosecutions and mob lynching, Mexican-American uprisings in Baja, and Mexican peasant revolts led by Wobblies, hilarious and sentimental songs created and later revived—all are here, and much, much more. The IWW, which has been organizing workers since 1905, is often cited yet elusive to scholars because of its eclectic and controversial cultural and social character. Wobblies! presents the IWW whole, scripted and drawn by old-time and younger Wobbly and IWW-inspired artists. Contributors include Carlos Cortez (former editor of the Industrial Worker), Harvey Pekar (author of American Splendor), Peter Kuper (MAD’s Spy vs. Spy), Sue Coe, Seth Tobocman, Chris Cardinale, Ryan Inzana, Spain Rodriques, Trina Robbins, Sharon Rudahl, and the circle of artists for World War 3 Illustrated.

A People's History of American Empire: A Graphic Adaptation (American Empire Project)

by Howard Zinn, Paul Buhle, Mike Konopacki

Adapted from the bestselling grassroots history of the United States, the story of America in the world, told in comics form

Since its landmark publication in 1980, A People's History of the United States has had six new editions, sold more than 1.7 million copies, become required classroom reading throughout the country, and been turned into an acclaimed play. More than a successful book, A People's History triggered a revolution in the way history is told, displacing the official versions with their emphasis on great men in high places to chronicle events as they were lived, from the bottom up.

Now Howard Zinn, historian Paul Buhle, and cartoonist Mike Konopacki have collaborated to retell, in vibrant comics form, a most immediate and relevant chapter of A People's History: the centuries-long story of America's actions in the world. Narrated by Zinn, this version opens with the events of 9/11 and then jumps back to explore the cycles of U.S. expansionism from Wounded Knee to Iraq, stopping along the way at World War I, Central America, Vietnam, and the Iranian revolution. The book also follows the story of Zinn, the son of poor Jewish immigrants, from his childhood in the Brooklyn slums to his role as one of America's leading historians.

Shifting from world-shattering events to one family's small revolutions, A People's History of American Empire presents the classic ground-level history of America in a dazzling new form.

The Beats: A Graphic History

by Harvey Pekar, Paul Buhle, Ed Piskor

In The Beats: A Graphic History, those who were mad to live have come back to life through artwork as vibrant as the Beat movement itself. Told by the comic legend Harvey Pekar, his frequent artistic collaborator Ed Piskor, and a range of artists and writers, including the feminist comic creator Trina Robbins and the Mad magazine artist Peter Kuper, The Beats takes us on a wild tour of a generation that, in the face of mainstream American conformity and conservatism, became known for its determined uprootedness, aggressive addictions, and startling creativity and experimentation.

What began among a small circle of friends in New York and San Francisco during the late 1940s and early 1950s laid the groundwork for a literary explosion, and this striking anthology captures the storied era in all its incarnations―from the Benzedrine-fueled antics of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs to the painting sessions of Jay DeFeo's disheveled studio, from the jazz hipsters to the beatnik chicks, from Chicago's College of Complexes to San Francisco's famed City Lights bookstore. Snapshots of lesser-known poets and writers sit alongside frank and compelling looks at the Beats' most recognizable faces. What emerges is a brilliant collage of―and tribute to―a generation, in a form and style that is as original as its subject.

The Beats: A Graphic History

by Harvey Pekar, Paul Buhle, Ed Piskor

In The Beats: A Graphic History, those who were mad to live have come back to life through artwork as vibrant as the Beat movement itself. Told by the comic legend Harvey Pekar, his frequent artistic collaborator Ed Piskor, and a range of artists and writers, including the feminist comic creator Trina Robbins and the Mad magazine artist Peter Kuper, The Beats takes us on a wild tour of a generation that, in the face of mainstream American conformity and conservatism, became known for its determined uprootedness, aggressive addictions, and startling creativity and experimentation. What began among a small circle of friends in New York and San Francisco during the late 1940s and early 1950s laid the groundwork for a literary explosion, and this striking anthology captures the storied era in all its incarnations—from the Benzedrine-fueled antics of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs to the painting sessions of Jay DeFeo’s disheveled studio, from the jazz hipsters to the beatnik chicks, from Chicago’s College of Complexes to San Francisco’s famed City Lights bookstore. Snapshots of lesser-known poets and writers sit alongside frank and compelling looks at the Beats’ most recognizable faces. What emerges is a brilliant collage of—and tribute to—a generation, in a form and style that is as original as its subject.

Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America's Favorite Movies

by Paul Buhle, David Wagner

Radical Hollywood is the first comprehensive history of the Hollywood Left. From the dawn of sound movies to the early 1950s, Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner trace the political and personal lives of the screenwriters, actors, directors, and producers on the Left and the often decisive impact of their work upon American film's Golden Age.
Full of rich anecdotes, biographical detail, and explorations of movies well known, unjustly forgotten, and delightfully bizarre, the book is "an intelligent, well argued and absorbing examination of how politics and art can make startling and often strange bedfellows" (Publishers Weekly). Featuring an insert of rare film stills, Radical Hollywood relates the story behind the story of films in such genres as crime, women's films, family cinema, war, animation, and, particularly, film noir.

Johnny Appleseed: Green Dreamer of the American Frontier

by Paul Buhle

The first scholarly comic art biography of the legendary John Chapman. Johnny Appleseed made himself famous by spreading the seeds of apple trees from Pennsylvania to Indiana. He was also an early follower of theologian Emanuel Swedenborg. Along with apple trees, he offered the seeds of nonviolence and vegetarianism, good relations with Indians, and peace among the settlers themselves. The story of John Chapman operates as a kind of counter-narrative to the glorification of violence, conquest, and the "winning of the West" in the story of the Westward movement, and clears up many of the half-myths of Johnny Appleseed's own life and work. His apples, for instance, were prized for many reasons, but mainly for the making of hard cider, portable alcohol. His method of operation was a form of land speculation, purchasing potentially fertile acres on contract (such as "bottom land"), planting saplings, reselling the land, and then moving onward. He had less interest in becoming prosperousthan in spreading his own gospel, based on visions of peace and love.

Noah Van Sciver is member ofMad Magazine's usual gang of idiots, and the author ofThe Hypo andFante Bukowski.

Paul Buhle, formerly a senior lecturer at Brown University, produces radical comics. He founded the SDS journalRadical America and the archive Oral History of the American Left and, with Mari Jo Buhle, is coeditor of theEncyclopedia of the American Left.

Eugene V. Debs: A Graphic Biography

by Paul Buhle, Steve Max

A graphic biography of socialist labor legend Eugene V. Debs

Dynamic and beloved American radical, labor leader, and socialist Eugene Victor Debs led the Socialist Party to federal and state office across the United States by the 1920s. Imprisoned for speaking out against World War I, Debs ran for president from prison on the Socialist Party ticket, receiving over 1 million votes. Debs’s life is a story of labor battles in industrializing America, of a fighting socialist politics grown directly out of the Midwest heartland, and of a distinctly American vision of socialism.

Bohemians: A Graphic History

by Paul Buhle, David Berger

The nineteenth-century countercultures that came to define the bohemian lifestyle spanned both sides of the Atlantic, ranging from Walt Whitman to Josephine Baker, and from Gertrude Stein to Thelonius Monk. Bohemians is the graphic history of this movement and its illustrious figures, recovering the utopian ideas behind millennial communities, and covering the rise of Greenwich Village, the multiracial and radical jazz world, and West Coast and Midwest bohemians, among other scenes.

Drawn by an all-star cast of comics artists, including rising figures like Sabrina Jones, Lance Tooks, and Summer McClinton, alongside established artists like Peter Kuper and Spain Rodriguez, Bohemians is a broad and entertaining account of the rebel impulse in American cultural history.

featuring work by Spain Rodriguez, Sharon Rudahl, Peter Kuper, Sabrina Jones, David Lasky, Afua Richardson, Lance Tooks, Milton Knight, and others.

The ebook edition is expanded from the paperback edition, and includes additional chapters on the swing music scene, La Boheme and midwest bohemians, as well as expanded material on the Greenwich Village intellectuals, Walt Whitman and Harlem jazz club Minton's Playhouse.

Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left

by Paul Buhle

A crown jewel of New Left historiography, this overview of U.S. Marxism was hailed on its first publication for its nuanced storytelling, balance and incredible sweep.

Brimming over with archival finds and buoyed by the recollections of witnesses and participants in the radical movements of decades past, Marxism in the United States includes fascinating accounts of the immigrant socialism of the nineteenth century, the formation of the CPUSA in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, the rise of American communism and of the hugely influential Popular Front in the 1920s and ’30s, the crisis and split of the ’50s, and the revival of Marxism in the ’60s and ’70s.

This revised and updated edition also takes into account the last quartercentury of life in the U.S., bringing the story of American Marxism up to the present.

With today’s resurgent interest in radicalism, this new edition provides an unparalleled guide to 150 years of American left history.

C.L.R. James The Artist as Revolutionary

by Paul Buhle

A new edition of C.L.R. James’s authorized biography

C.L.R. James was a man of prodigious and varied accomplishments. He was a protean twentieth-century Marxist intellectual, widely recognized as a pioneering scholar of slave revolt; a leading voice of Pan-Africanism; a peripatetic revolutionary and scholar active in US and UK radical movements; a novelist, playwright, and critic; and one of the premier writers on cricket and sports. This intellectual portrait was written by James’s longtime interlocutor and comrade Paul Buhle, and initially published in 1988.

With a new final chapter, updated bibliography, a new foreword by historian Robin D.G. Kelley and a new afterword by Paul Buhle and the philosopher Lawrence Ware, this long-awaited revised edition of a classic biography will be a key resource in the James revival.

Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular and the New Land

by Harvey Pekar, Paul Buhle

Yiddish is everywhere. We hear words like nosh, schlep, and schmutz all the time, but how did these words come to pepper American English? In Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular and the New Land, Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle trace the influence of Yiddish from medieval Europe to the tenements of New York’s Lower East Side. This comics anthology contains original stories by notable writers and artists such as Barry Deutsch, Peter Kuper, Spain Rodriguez, and Sharon Rudahl. Through illustrations, comics art, and a full-length play, four major themes are explored: culture, performance, assimilation, and the revival of the language. The last fully realized work by Harvey Pekar, this book is a thoughtful compilation that reveals the far-reaching influences of Yiddish.

Praise for Yiddishkeit:

“The book is about what Neal Gabler in his introduction labels ‘Jewish sensibility.’ It pervades this volume, which he acknowledges is messy; he writes: ‘You really can't define Yiddishkeit neatly in words or pictures. You sort of have to feel it by wading into it.’ The book does this with gusto.” —New York Times

“Yiddishkeit is as colorful, bawdy, and charming as the culture it seeks to represent.”
—Print magazine

“every bit of it brimming with the charm and flavor of its subject and seamlessly meshing with the text to create a genuinely compelling, scholarly comics experience”

—Publishers Weekly

“Yiddishkeit is a book that truly informs about Jewish culture and, in the process, challenges readers to pick apart their own vocabulary.” —Chicago Tribune
“a postvernacular tour de force”

—The Forward

“A fascinating and enlightening effort that takes full use of the graphic storytelling medium in an insightful and revelatory way.” —The Miami Herald

“With a loving eye Pekar and Buhle extract moments and personalities from Yiddish history.” —Hadassah

“gorgeous comix-style portraits of Yiddish writers”
––Tablet

“Yiddishkeit has managed to survive, if just barely, not because there are individuals dedicated to its survival, though there are, but because Yiddishkeit is an essential part of both the Jewish and the human experience.”
—Neal Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, from his introduction

"The hearty hardcover is a scrumptious smorgasbord of comics, essays, and illustrations, edited by Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle, providing concentrated tastes, with historical context, of Yiddish theater, literature, characters and culture." —Heeb magazine

Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950-2002

by Paul Buhle, Dave Wagner

Hide in Plain Sight offers a powerful examination of the effects of Hollywood's blacklist era, taking up the question of how blacklistees fared after they were driven out of the mainstream. A good number entered careers in television, with many finding work in children's and family programs, writing for shows like Rocky and Bullwinkle, Lassie, and Flipper. Many also wrote adult sitcoms such as Hogan's Heroes,The Donna Reed Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, M*A*S*H, Maude, and All in the Family. Ultimately, many returned to Hollywood in the sixties and seventies to work creatively on films that contained a dose of the radical politics found in communism, films that influenced the creative outburst of that decade. The list of impressive films from the survivors of HUAC includes Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Midnight Cowboy. Hide in Plain Sight completes Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner's trilogy, which includes Tender Comrades (1998) and Radical Hollywood (2002). Together these books provide a thorough and disturbing portrait of the McCarthy era's impact on an important aspect of American culture and society.