The Invaders

by Waldo Frank

"The Invaders" is the eleventh of twelve novels Waldo Frank published during his lifetime. Frank was a leftist intellectual whose essays at the intersection of literary culture, politics, and society were very influential, especially among the literati, throughout the decade of the 1930s. He was part of the circle that included Van Wyck Brooks, Randolph Bourne, and Lewis Mumford. Beginning in the 1920s, he particularly focused his efforts on fostering greater understanding of Latin America in the United States, which led to his becoming better known in Spain, Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, and other Spanish-speaking countries than in his own. This is true even to this day. Though Frank published a dozen novels, some of considerable length, he cannot be said to have been successful in that genre. He was too experimental and "serious" to be popular, and too traditional to be admired by modernist critics. This apocalyptic science fiction novel is a departure for him, genre-wise. Of course, it was written in the wake of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the early days of the Cold War. It is hardly surprising that an end-of-the-world feeling should have come into the book he wrote at that time.

239 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1948

About the author

Waldo David Frank was an American novelist, historian, political activist, and literary critic, who wrote extensively for The New Yorker and The New Republic during the 1920s and 1930s. Frank is best known for his studies of Spanish and Latin American literature and culture and his work is regarded as an intellectual bridge between the two continents.

A radical political activist during the years of the Great Depression, Frank delivered a keynote speech to the first congress of the League of American Writers and was the first chair of that organization. Frank broke with the Communist Party, USA in 1937 over its treatment of exiled Soviet leader Leon Trotsky, whom Frank met in Mexico in January of that year.