Maxwell Geismar

From Philosopedia

Geismar, Maxwell (1909—1979)

A “radical” literary critic, editor of Portable Thomas Wolfe (1944), author of Writers in Crisis (1942), and Walt Whitman Reader (1955), Geismar wrote his views about humanism:

I think that Thomas Mann was right in saying in a letter to Warren Allen Smith that writers do not and cannot belong to any one “school,” philosophically, politically, and else wise, though they may move from one group to another at different times in their development and draw ideas and feelings from all groups; for the essence of a writer is both high individuality and communal roots. In terms of your listing, I think I would be closest to Classical Humanism and Naturalistic Humanism as a background for my own values. But what I think is really and perhaps desperately needed today is a new synthesis, and a new nourishing of the humanistic tradition; and some way of giving it a new mode of psycho-biological force and depth; of imbuing these ancient and tried human values with a new life spirit. That is what I am looking for in my own work, at least; while I have little patience with the recent movement to a new religious orientation—of “sin” or of social prestige, or both together. I am not particularly interested in Atheism or Communism within this framework of Humanism; but Atheists often have been great humanists, in fact, in what I know of American literature.

{WAS, 7 May 1956}