American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams

by Peter Richardson

A long-overdue book on the brilliant life and career of one of our greatest public intellectuals, American Prophet will introduce Carey McWilliams to a new generation of readers.

Peter Richardson's absorbing and elegantly paced book reveals a figure thoroughly engaged with the issues of his time. Deftly interweaving correspondence, diary notes, published writings, and McWilliams's own and others' observations on a colorful and influential cast of characters from Hollywood, New York, Washington, DC, and the American West, Richardson maps the evolution of McWilliams's personal and professional life. Among those making an appearance are H. L. Mencken (McWilliams's mentor and role model), Louis Adamic, John Fante, Robert Towne, Richard Nixon, Studs Terkel, J. Edgar Hoover, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Joseph McCarthy.

American Prophet illustrates the arc of McWilliams's life and career from his early literary journalism through his legal and political activism, his stint in state government, and his two decades as editor of the Nation . This book makes the case for McWilliams's place in the Olympian realm of our most influential and prescient political writers.

Peter Richardson is the editorial director at PoliPointPress in Sausalito, California. He is the author or editor of numerous works on language, literature, and California public policy. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California Berkeley.

358 pages, Hardcover

First published October 11, 2005

About the author

Peter Richardson has written critically acclaimed books about Hunter S. Thompson, the Grateful Dead, Ramparts magazine, and radical author and editor Carey McWilliams. He is currently completing a book about the first decade of Rolling Stone magazine.

Richardson's essays have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Guernica, California History, and many other outlets. Excerpts of his work have appeared in the New York Times, Mother Jones, and Bookforum. A busy book reviewer, Richardson received the National Entertainment Journalism Award for Online Criticism in 2013.

From 2006 to 2023, Richardson taught courses on California culture at San Francisco State University. His cultural commentary has been featured in major newspapers and magazines in North America and abroad, and he has appeared in several documentary films and television programs. He is regular guest on radio programs and podcasts, and he speaks occasionally at universities, museums, book festivals, and historical societies.

Richardson's professional experience includes editorial stints at the University of California Press, PoliPoint Press, the Public Policy Institute of California, and Harper & Row, Publishers.

In the 1990s, Richardson was an associate professor of English at the University of North Texas, a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Iceland, and an NEH Summer Seminar fellow at Harvard University. He also wrote a textbook on stylistic revision, now in its second edition. Before that, he earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Born and raised in the East Bay, he now lives in Sonoma County.

Reviews

[Nils · Rating 4 out of 5]

A serviceable intellectual biography, rooted in a lot of good material from McWilliams’s personal papers, interviews with people who knew McWilliams, as well as a thorough reading of McWilliams’s voluminous oeuvre. Though not a “life and times” it does a good job situating McWilliams within the political ferment of the period. Its close readings of his major texts are somewhat perfunctory: more explications du textes than incisive or original takes on these works. It’s not hagiography, because Richardson doesn’t spare the reader McWilliams’s mistakes and faults, but it didn’t lead me to any radically new understanding of McW’s work.

As a story of a life however I learned a lot: I didn’t realize what a blazing career start McWilliams got off too, even as he truly hit his stride from his mid-30s to his mid-40s, working as an indefatigable political organizer and prolific writer. After he left Los Angeles to edit the Nation in 1951, however, his own intellectual output slowed notably. Richardson prefers to put it down to the effects of the anti-Communist chill and a professional commitment to his publication, but I couldn’t help but wonder whether can’t help but wonder whether his drinking might also have begun to take its toll, as it did on so many men of his generation.

[James Levy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good book but somehow it was diminished by the introduction by Mike Davis and the mentions of McWilliams in Davis's work. The author does a fine job of talking about the man, but I was more interested in his ideas. OK, this IS a bit unfair--you shouldn't review a book the author didn't set out to write. But then I run into the problem that McWilliams's life just wasn't interesting enough to me to carry the work. Which leaves me with a good book, but not a really good book. Nevertheless, certainly worth reading.

[Elaine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carey McWilliams is one of my heroes, and so I eagerly picked up this book when my friend Lisa Maldonado suggested it. I was not at all disappointed in the writing nor the excellent way author Peter Richardson placed McWilliams in his historical context all the way through the 20th C. from early attempts to organize farmworkers in the 1930s to opposition to the Vietnam War. What did surprise -- and, I guess, disappoint -- me was to learn of my hero's feet of clay. This amazing and prolific writer, who was way ahead of his time in writing about race, poverty and exploitation of labor long before any of those crucial issues were on the mainstream political agenda, had shortcomings and prejudices that one would never detect from his writings. Disappointing but makes for fascinating reading!

[Robert Baird · Rating 4 out of 5]

Few things get me engrossed like a good biography- and this is one of the best I've ever read. If you are into California history or progressive politics, and especially if you are into California political history, this book will engross you too. Richardson does a really good job- managing to cover a lot of details over the span of about sixty years, with only tiny stretches of monotony.