| Summary: | "Before he became one of Canada's most influential and popular twentieth-century poets, Earle Birney lived a double life. To his students and colleagues, he was an engaging university lecturer and scholar. But for seven years from 1933 to 1940, the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky was the focus of his writing and much of his life. Although Lenin favoured Trotsky to succeed him as leader of the USSR, Stalin outmanouvred Trotsky and banished him. Yet for thousands of followers like Birney, the former head of the Red Army and literary intellectual charted the path to true socialism through world-wide revolution. During his years as a Trotskyist in Canada, the United States and England, Birney wrote extensively about Trotsky, corresponded with Trotsky, organized Trotskyist cells in two countries, recruited in behalf of Trotskyism, lectured about Trotsky, and interviewed Trotsky himself over several days. One of his two novels is based on some of these Trotskyist activities. For the first time this book presents all Birney's known published and unpublished writing on Trotsky and Trotskyism, including their correspondence, a selection of other letters on his political work, and his literary writing from a demonstrably Trotskyist perspective. As well as providing original source material for helping to understand Canadian Trotskyism, the volume traces the origins of Trotsky's mistrust of "the British" to his experiences in Canada; shows Birney's influence on a major change in Trotsky's policy of "entrism" in British politics; includes the largest body of Trotskyist criticism in Canadian literary history; and demonstrates the need for a radical re-reading of Birney's poetry in light of his Trotskyism."--
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