Jonah Raskin
Encyclopedia
Jonah Raskin is an American writer who left an East Coast university teaching position to participate in the 1970s radical counterculture as a free-lance journalist, then returned to the academy in California in the 1980s to write probing studies of Abbie Hoffman
and Allen Ginsberg
and reviews of northern California writers whom he styled as "natives, newcomers, exiles and fugitives." Beginning as a lecturer in English at Sonoma State University
in 1981, he moved to chair of the Communications Studies Department from 1988 to 2007, while serving as a book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle
and the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat.
. His parents were Communists in the 1930s and 40s, but as his father became a successful attorney in the 1950s, they concealed their radical politics and were careful to blend into their middle-class community. Hiding, dissembling, and disguising would become persistent themes in Raskin's writing, along with the personas of the exile and the fugitive. Raskin gave every appearance of being the all-American teenager; he was co-captain of his high school football team, and named to Newsday
's All-Suffolk Football Squad in 1958. He also worked as a sports reporter for The Long Islander in his last year of high school.
Raskin attended Columbia College, studying literature with Lionel Trilling
, receiving a B.A. degree in 1963, and an M.A. in American Literature in 1964. He taught at Winston-Salem State College in the summer of 1964, then married and moved to England in the fall to study British and American literature at the University of Manchester
. He received his Ph.D. in 1967 with a dissertation on the mythology of imperialism
in the work of Rudyard Kipling
and Joseph Conrad
, and obtained his first full-time teaching position in the English Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
from 1967 to 1972. Raskin turned his Ph.D. thesis into a book entitled The Mythology of Imperialism, which Random House published in 1971. The New York Times called it "Maoist" literary criticism. Edward Said
, the author of Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, wrote in 1984 that it was "one of the genuinely important handful of book on modern literature published in the last two decades", and that "Raskin's quite unique feat was to have connected the genuine aesthetic power of the novelists to the political power of the culture abroad." The Mythology of Imperialism has since been republished in a new edition by Monthly Review Press
, with a new introduction and conclusion by Raskin and a foreword by Columbia literature professor Bruce Robbins.
(SDS) at Columbia University in 1968. His wife, Eleanor Raskin
, became involved with the Weatherman
faction of SDS, and he followed with some ambivalence. He was arrested and beaten by New York police in December 1969 after smashing windows in a street demonstration organized by Weatherman. Failing to get tenure at Stony Brook because of his militant activity, Raskin abandoned his academic career for the life of a radical free-lance journalist.
He joined Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin
and Paul Krassner
in the Youth International Party
(the Yippies) in 1967, and was designated its Minister of Education in 1970. He traveled to Algiers with Jennifer Dohrn (sister of Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn
) as part of a Yippie delegation in October 1970 to meet with Eldridge Cleaver
and Timothy Leary
, whom the Weather Underground had helped escape from a low-security prison in California. Their plan, to link the anti-war movement in the United States with global protests, came to naught when Cleaver attempted to arrest Leary, and Leary and his wife fled to Switzerland. Raskin later interviewed Leary for High Times magazine shortly before Leary's death in 1996.
In 1974, Raskin received a grant from the Rabinowitz Foundation in N.Y. for research on the Cold War
and American culture in the literature of the period from 1945 to 1960, reading and interviewing that would inform his later book on Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation
, American Scream.
Raskin helped Abbie Hoffman go underground in 1974, and traveled with him when he was a fugitive for much of the 1970s, coming into contact once again with the Weather Underground, a subject he addressed in an autobiographical novel, Underground. His wife Eleanor had become a fugitive, and he made an unsuccessful effort to preserve their floundering marriage by making contact with her. In 1974 Raskin compiled and wrote an introduction to a collection of Weather Underground communiqués, The Weather Eye, and set up an imprint, Union Square Press, to publish the work. His introduction was academic in tone, and gave no hint that he'd had a hand in drafting the statement, "New Morning, Changing Weather", that adopted a more moderate tone and began the process of Weather leaders resurfacing from the underground.
During this period Raskin lived on fees and advances from articles and books, writing for a variety of publications including Monthly Review
, the San Francisco Review of Books, The International Herald Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Village Voice, and for various alternative newspapers and magazines, including Liberation News Service
, The Seed, University Review, Liberation, The San Francisco Bay Guardian
, L.A. Weekly, and the northern California Bohemian. He covered the trial of the Panther 21 in New York in 1970, and wrote about such fugitives and prisoners as Dennis Banks
of the American Indian Movement
and Oscar Collazo
, the Puerto Rican nationalist. He traveled to Mexico in 1975 in search of the elusive writer B. Traven
, a journey that became the subject of My Search for B. Traven.
Raskin settled in Sonoma County, California
, in the winter of 1976, where he had come to visit his parents, who had retired to the rural community of Occidental
. Gradually detaching himself from New York and the radical left, Raskin began to meet such California writers as Tillie Olsen
and Jessica Mitford
, and pitched ideas for movies to Hollywood producers. He created the characters and the story about marijuana cultivation in northern California for the movie Homegrown, eventually produced in 1996, directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal
; Raskin appears in a crowd scene at the end of the film.
, Belgium, in 1986-1987, teaching 19th and 20th century American literature and culture.
During the 1980s and '90s, Raskin wrote scores of book reviews for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, and a variety of other publications. His signature format coupled his reviews with separate in-depth interviews that often evoked wide-ranging conversations with the authors, including writers from Doris Lessing
and Kurt Vonnegut
to Alice Walker
and Greg Sarris
.
Raskin's biography of Abbie Hoffman, For the Hell of It, captures the genius and the flaws of the Yippie spokesman and his place in the tumultuous sixties, follows him as he flees underground to avoid prison on drug charges, and is straightforward in acknowledging the bipolar disorder that led to Hoffman's suicide in 1989.
In American Scream, Raskin studies Allen Ginsberg's development as a poet in the context of "Howl", the most influential poem of his generation. Raskin traces Ginsberg's studies with Lionel Trilling, his relationship with his father (a schoolteacher and poet), and his Beat Generation
colleagues. Raskin explores the consequences of Ginsberg's mother's mental illness on the theme of societal insanity in "Howl", and relates the court case that set a new direction for artistic freedom at the end of the repressive 1950s.
Raskin has subjected his radicalism of the 1960s and '70s to a searching and thoughtful analysis, and he now views his affiliation with the Weather Underground and his endorsement of its politics as largely self-dramatization that wasted the energy and resources of the above-ground enablers as well as the underground fugitives. A final moment of political disillusionment with the radical left and dreams of Third World socialism came with a visit to Hanoi
in 1995, where he experienced Vietnam
as a country run by a Communist elite rapidly enriching themselves from a freewheeling capitalist economy.
Raskin's distance from his former comrades is apparent in his new introduction to the collection of Weather Underground communiqués republished, along with his original introduction, in Sing a Battle Song. Raskin allowed his introduction to be edited for the collection, but he published an expanded version in a left journal. To anyone who wants to go underground and commit acts of violence in America today, Raskin advises, "Don’t do it. Be visible. Talk openly. Go out and meet people. Organize. Educate. Avoid violence. Democracy is in the streets, on the Internet, and wherever people meet."
's political writing, The Radical Jack London, adding a significant interpretive essay. His latest books are Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine in California (2009) and Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War (2011).
Poetry chapbooks
Abbie Hoffman
Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman was a political and social activist who co-founded the Youth International Party ....
and Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
and reviews of northern California writers whom he styled as "natives, newcomers, exiles and fugitives." Beginning as a lecturer in English at Sonoma State University
Sonoma State University
Sonoma State University is a public, coeducational business and liberal arts college affiliated with the California State University system. The main campus is located in Rohnert Park, California, United States and lies approximately south of Santa Rosa and north of San Francisco...
in 1981, he moved to chair of the Communications Studies Department from 1988 to 2007, while serving as a book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle
thumb|right|upright|The Chronicle Building following the [[1906 San Francisco earthquake|1906 earthquake]] and fireThe San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California, but distributed throughout Northern and Central California,...
and the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat.
Early life
Born in New York City to a secular Jewish family, Raskin was raised in Huntington, Long IslandHuntington, New York
The Town of Huntington is one of ten towns in Suffolk County, New York, USA. Founded in 1653, it is located on the north shore of Long Island in northwestern Suffolk County, with Long Island Sound to its north and Nassau County adjacent to the west. Huntington is part of the New York metropolitan...
. His parents were Communists in the 1930s and 40s, but as his father became a successful attorney in the 1950s, they concealed their radical politics and were careful to blend into their middle-class community. Hiding, dissembling, and disguising would become persistent themes in Raskin's writing, along with the personas of the exile and the fugitive. Raskin gave every appearance of being the all-American teenager; he was co-captain of his high school football team, and named to Newsday
Newsday
Newsday is a daily American newspaper that primarily serves Nassau and Suffolk counties and the New York City borough of Queens on Long Island, although it is sold throughout the New York metropolitan area...
's All-Suffolk Football Squad in 1958. He also worked as a sports reporter for The Long Islander in his last year of high school.
Raskin attended Columbia College, studying literature with Lionel Trilling
Lionel Trilling
Lionel Trilling was an American literary critic, author, and teacher. With wife Diana Trilling, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review. Although he did not establish a school of literary criticism, he is one of the leading U.S...
, receiving a B.A. degree in 1963, and an M.A. in American Literature in 1964. He taught at Winston-Salem State College in the summer of 1964, then married and moved to England in the fall to study British and American literature at the University of Manchester
University of Manchester
The University of Manchester is a public research university located in Manchester, United Kingdom. It is a "red brick" university and a member of the Russell Group of research-intensive British universities and the N8 Group...
. He received his Ph.D. in 1967 with a dissertation on the mythology of imperialism
Imperialism
Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...
in the work of Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature...
and Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist.Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties...
, and obtained his first full-time teaching position in the English Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
State University of New York at Stony Brook
The State University of New York at Stony Brook, also known as Stony Brook University, is a public research university located in Stony Brook, New York, on the North Shore of Long Island, about east of Manhattan....
from 1967 to 1972. Raskin turned his Ph.D. thesis into a book entitled The Mythology of Imperialism, which Random House published in 1971. The New York Times called it "Maoist" literary criticism. Edward Said
Edward Said
Edward Wadie Saïd was a Palestinian-American literary theorist and advocate for Palestinian rights. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in postcolonialism...
, the author of Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, wrote in 1984 that it was "one of the genuinely important handful of book on modern literature published in the last two decades", and that "Raskin's quite unique feat was to have connected the genuine aesthetic power of the novelists to the political power of the culture abroad." The Mythology of Imperialism has since been republished in a new edition by Monthly Review Press
Monthly Review
Monthly Review is an independent Marxist journal published 11 times per year in New York City.-History:The publication was founded by Harvard University economics instructor Paul Sweezy, who became the first editor...
, with a new introduction and conclusion by Raskin and a foreword by Columbia literature professor Bruce Robbins.
Into the Seventies
Identifying with the growing social movements of the late 1960s, Raskin joined the building occupation led by Students for a Democratic SocietyStudents for a Democratic Society (1960 organization)
Students for a Democratic Society was a student activist movement in the United States that was one of the main iconic representations of the country's New Left. The organization developed and expanded rapidly in the mid-1960s before dissolving at its last convention in 1969...
(SDS) at Columbia University in 1968. His wife, Eleanor Raskin
Eleanor Raskin
Eleanor E. Raskin née Stein; was a member of Weatherman. She is currently an associate professor at Albany Law School, teaching transnational environmental law with a focus on catastrophic climate change.- Early life :Eleanor E...
, became involved with the Weatherman
Weatherman (organization)
Weatherman, known colloquially as the Weathermen and later the Weather Underground Organization , was an American radical left organization. It originated in 1969 as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society composed for the most part of the national office leadership of SDS and their...
faction of SDS, and he followed with some ambivalence. He was arrested and beaten by New York police in December 1969 after smashing windows in a street demonstration organized by Weatherman. Failing to get tenure at Stony Brook because of his militant activity, Raskin abandoned his academic career for the life of a radical free-lance journalist.
He joined Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin
Jerry Rubin
Jerry Rubin was an American social activist during the 1960s and 1970s. During the 1980s, he became a successful businessman.-Early life:...
and Paul Krassner
Paul Krassner
Paul Krassner is an author, journalist, stand-up comedian, and the founder, editor and a frequent contributor to the freethought magazine The Realist, first published in 1958...
in the Youth International Party
Youth International Party
The Youth International Party, whose members were commonly called Yippies, was a radically youth-oriented and countercultural revolutionary offshoot of the free speech and anti-war movements of the 1960s. It was founded on Dec. 31, 1967...
(the Yippies) in 1967, and was designated its Minister of Education in 1970. He traveled to Algiers with Jennifer Dohrn (sister of Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn
Bernardine Dohrn
Bernardine Rae Dohrn is a former leader of the American anti-Vietnam War radical organization, Weather Underground. She is an Associate Professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law and the immediate past Director of Northwestern's Children and Family Justice Center...
) as part of a Yippie delegation in October 1970 to meet with Eldridge Cleaver
Eldridge Cleaver
Leroy Eldridge Cleaver better known as Eldridge Cleaver, was a leading member of the Black Panther Party and a writer...
and Timothy Leary
Timothy Leary
Timothy Francis Leary was an American psychologist and writer, known for his advocacy of psychedelic drugs. During a time when drugs like LSD and psilocybin were legal, Leary conducted experiments at Harvard University under the Harvard Psilocybin Project, resulting in the Concord Prison...
, whom the Weather Underground had helped escape from a low-security prison in California. Their plan, to link the anti-war movement in the United States with global protests, came to naught when Cleaver attempted to arrest Leary, and Leary and his wife fled to Switzerland. Raskin later interviewed Leary for High Times magazine shortly before Leary's death in 1996.
In 1974, Raskin received a grant from the Rabinowitz Foundation in N.Y. for research on the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
and American culture in the literature of the period from 1945 to 1960, reading and interviewing that would inform his later book on Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
, American Scream.
Raskin helped Abbie Hoffman go underground in 1974, and traveled with him when he was a fugitive for much of the 1970s, coming into contact once again with the Weather Underground, a subject he addressed in an autobiographical novel, Underground. His wife Eleanor had become a fugitive, and he made an unsuccessful effort to preserve their floundering marriage by making contact with her. In 1974 Raskin compiled and wrote an introduction to a collection of Weather Underground communiqués, The Weather Eye, and set up an imprint, Union Square Press, to publish the work. His introduction was academic in tone, and gave no hint that he'd had a hand in drafting the statement, "New Morning, Changing Weather", that adopted a more moderate tone and began the process of Weather leaders resurfacing from the underground.
During this period Raskin lived on fees and advances from articles and books, writing for a variety of publications including Monthly Review
Monthly Review
Monthly Review is an independent Marxist journal published 11 times per year in New York City.-History:The publication was founded by Harvard University economics instructor Paul Sweezy, who became the first editor...
, the San Francisco Review of Books, The International Herald Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Village Voice, and for various alternative newspapers and magazines, including Liberation News Service
Liberation News Service
Liberation News Service was a New Left, Underground press news service which published news bulletins from 1967 to 1981.-History:The Liberation News Service was co-founded in the summer of 1967 by Ray Mungo and Marshall Bloom after the two of them were separated from the United States Student...
, The Seed, University Review, Liberation, The San Francisco Bay Guardian
San Francisco Bay Guardian
The San Francisco Bay Guardian is a free alternative newspaper published weekly in San Francisco, California. The paper is owned mostly by its publisher, Bruce B...
, L.A. Weekly, and the northern California Bohemian. He covered the trial of the Panther 21 in New York in 1970, and wrote about such fugitives and prisoners as Dennis Banks
Dennis Banks
Dennis Banks , a Native American leader, teacher, lecturer, activist and author, is an Anishinaabe born on Leech Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota. Banks is also known as Nowa Cumig...
of the American Indian Movement
American Indian Movement
The American Indian Movement is a Native American activist organization in the United States, founded in 1968 in Minneapolis, Minnesota by urban Native Americans. The national AIM agenda focuses on spirituality, leadership, and sovereignty...
and Oscar Collazo
Oscar Collazo
Oscar Collazo , was one of two Puerto Ricans who attempted to assassinate U.S. President Harry S. Truman.-Early life:...
, the Puerto Rican nationalist. He traveled to Mexico in 1975 in search of the elusive writer B. Traven
B. Traven
B. Traven was the pen name of a German novelist, whose real name, nationality, date and place of birth and details of biography are all subject to dispute. A rare certainty is that B...
, a journey that became the subject of My Search for B. Traven.
Raskin settled in Sonoma County, California
Sonoma County, California
Sonoma County, located on the northern coast of the U.S. state of California, is the largest and northernmost of the nine San Francisco Bay Area counties. Its population at the 2010 census was 483,878. Its largest city and county seat is Santa Rosa....
, in the winter of 1976, where he had come to visit his parents, who had retired to the rural community of Occidental
Occidental, California
Occidental is a census-designated place in Sonoma County, California, United States. The population was 1,115 at the 2010 census, down from 1,272 at the 2000 census.-Geography:Occidental is located at...
. Gradually detaching himself from New York and the radical left, Raskin began to meet such California writers as Tillie Olsen
Tillie Olsen
Tillie Lerner Olsen was an American writer associated with the political turmoil of the 1930s and the first generation of American feminists.-Biography:...
and Jessica Mitford
Jessica Mitford
Jessica Lucy Freeman-Mitford was an English author, journalist and political campaigner, who was one of the Mitford sisters...
, and pitched ideas for movies to Hollywood producers. He created the characters and the story about marijuana cultivation in northern California for the movie Homegrown, eventually produced in 1996, directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal
Stephen Gyllenhaal
-Personal life:Gyllenhaal was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Virginia Lowrie and Hugh Anders Gyllenhaal. The Gyllenhaal family is a descendant of the cavalry officer Nils Gunnesson Haal, who was ennobled in 1652 when Queen Christina of Sweden conferred upon him the crest and family name,...
; Raskin appears in a crowd scene at the end of the film.
Return to the university in the 1980s
Raskin returned to academics as a lecturer in the English Department at Sonoma State University from 1981 to 1987, and became chair of the Communication Studies Department from 1988 to date (2007). He has taught media law, the history of communications, film noir, and writing for newspapers, magazines, radio, the movies and memoirs. He was a Fulbright Professor at the University of Ghent and University of AntwerpUniversity of Antwerp
The University of Antwerp is one of the major Belgian universities located in the city of Antwerp. The name is sometimes abbreviated as UA.-History:...
, Belgium, in 1986-1987, teaching 19th and 20th century American literature and culture.
During the 1980s and '90s, Raskin wrote scores of book reviews for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, and a variety of other publications. His signature format coupled his reviews with separate in-depth interviews that often evoked wide-ranging conversations with the authors, including writers from Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing
Doris May Lessing CH is a British writer. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook, and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos....
and Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a 20th century American writer. His works such as Cat's Cradle , Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions blend satire, gallows humor and science fiction. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.-Early...
to Alice Walker
Alice Walker
Alice Malsenior Walker is an American author, poet, and activist. She has written both fiction and essays about race and gender...
and Greg Sarris
Greg Sarris
Gregory Michael Sarris is a college professor, author, screenwriter, and a member and current Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. He was chosen in 2005 to fill the Endowed Chair in Native American Studies at Sonoma State University...
.
Raskin's biography of Abbie Hoffman, For the Hell of It, captures the genius and the flaws of the Yippie spokesman and his place in the tumultuous sixties, follows him as he flees underground to avoid prison on drug charges, and is straightforward in acknowledging the bipolar disorder that led to Hoffman's suicide in 1989.
In American Scream, Raskin studies Allen Ginsberg's development as a poet in the context of "Howl", the most influential poem of his generation. Raskin traces Ginsberg's studies with Lionel Trilling, his relationship with his father (a schoolteacher and poet), and his Beat Generation
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
colleagues. Raskin explores the consequences of Ginsberg's mother's mental illness on the theme of societal insanity in "Howl", and relates the court case that set a new direction for artistic freedom at the end of the repressive 1950s.
Raskin has subjected his radicalism of the 1960s and '70s to a searching and thoughtful analysis, and he now views his affiliation with the Weather Underground and his endorsement of its politics as largely self-dramatization that wasted the energy and resources of the above-ground enablers as well as the underground fugitives. A final moment of political disillusionment with the radical left and dreams of Third World socialism came with a visit to Hanoi
Hanoi
Hanoi , is the capital of Vietnam and the country's second largest city. Its population in 2009 was estimated at 2.6 million for urban districts, 6.5 million for the metropolitan jurisdiction. From 1010 until 1802, it was the most important political centre of Vietnam...
in 1995, where he experienced Vietnam
Vietnam
Vietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...
as a country run by a Communist elite rapidly enriching themselves from a freewheeling capitalist economy.
Raskin's distance from his former comrades is apparent in his new introduction to the collection of Weather Underground communiqués republished, along with his original introduction, in Sing a Battle Song. Raskin allowed his introduction to be edited for the collection, but he published an expanded version in a left journal. To anyone who wants to go underground and commit acts of violence in America today, Raskin advises, "Don’t do it. Be visible. Talk openly. Go out and meet people. Organize. Educate. Avoid violence. Democracy is in the streets, on the Internet, and wherever people meet."
Current work
In the 1990s, Raskin began writing poetry and publishing it in chapbooks. His poems are unpredictable – alternately satiric, droll, and tender. He often performs his poems with musicians. Continuing his work on northern California authors, Raskin edited a book of Jack LondonJack London
John Griffith "Jack" London was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone...
's political writing, The Radical Jack London, adding a significant interpretive essay. His latest books are Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine in California (2009) and Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War (2011).
Publications by Jonah Raskin
Books- The Mythology of Imperialism: Rudyard KiplingRudyard KiplingJoseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature...
, Joseph ConradJoseph ConradJoseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist.Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties...
, E. M. ForsterE. M. ForsterEdward Morgan Forster OM, CH was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society...
, D. H. LawrenceD. H. LawrenceDavid Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
, and Joyce CaryJoyce CaryJoyce Cary was an Anglo-Irish novelist and artist.-Youth and education:...
(New York: Random House, 1971). ISBN 0394468376. (New edition published by Monthly Review PressMonthly ReviewMonthly Review is an independent Marxist journal published 11 times per year in New York City.-History:The publication was founded by Harvard University economics instructor Paul Sweezy, who became the first editor...
, 2009.) - Out of the Whale: Growing up in the American Left (New York: Links, 1974). ISBN 0825630398
- Editor, The Weather Eye: Communiques from the Weather Underground (New York: Union Square Press, 1974).
- Puerto Rico: The Flame of Resistance, co-author with Lincoln Bergman et al. (San Francisco: Peoples Press, 1976/7?) ISBN 0914750054
- Oscar Collazo: Portrait of a Puerto Rican Patriot (New York: New York Committee to Free the Puerto Rican Nationalist Prisoners, 1978).
- Underground: In Pursuit of B. Traven and Kenny Love (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1978). ISBN 0672523825
- My Search for B. Traven (New York: Methuen, 1980). ISBN 0416007414 Translated into French by Virgine Girard, A la recherche de B. Traven (Arles: Les Fondeurs de Briques, 2007).
- James D. HoustonJames D. HoustonJames Dudley Houston was an American novelist. He wrote nine novels in total.Houston was born in San Francisco, where his parents had migrated from Quanah, Texas, a small town near Oklahoma...
(Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1991). ISBN 0884300986 - For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). ISBN 0520205758
- American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and the Making of the Beat Generation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). ISBN 0520240154
- Natives, Newcomers, Exiles and Fugitives (Healdsburg, California: Running Wolf Press, 2004). ISBN 0970133383
- editor, The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). ISBN 0520255461
- Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). ISBN 0520259027
- Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War (New York: High Times Books, 2011). ISBN 978-1-893010-30-7
Poetry chapbooks
- Jonah Raskin's Greatest Hits: Poems 1996-1998 (Healdsburg, California: Running Wolf Press, 1999).
- More Poems, Better Poems (Healdsburg, California: Running Wolf Press, 2001).
- Bone Love (San Francisco: Alexander Book Company, 2004).
- Public Spaces, Private Places: New Poems (Salt Spring Island, BC: Running Wolf Press, 2007). ISBN 0-9746680-7-9
External links
- Jonah Raskin's home page at Sonoma State University
- http://www.monthlyreview.org/books/mythologyofimperialism.phpThe new edition of The Mythology of Imperialism from Monthly Review PressMonthly ReviewMonthly Review is an independent Marxist journal published 11 times per year in New York City.-History:The publication was founded by Harvard University economics instructor Paul Sweezy, who became the first editor...
(2009)]