Slow Vision
Maxwell Bodenheim
Introduction by Paul Maher Jr.
February 16, 2021
ISBN 9780578832395 / Paperback / 208 pages / $15.99

"I am a distinguished outcast in American letters—a renegade and recalcitrant, hated and feared by all cliques and snoring phantom celebrities, from ultra-radical to ultra-conservative—an isolated wanderer in the realm of intellect and lithely fantastic emotion, hemmed in by gnawing hostilities and blandly simulating venoms . . ."

Written in the shadow of the Great Depression, Slow Vision was Maxwell Bodenheim's final novel and one of his most politically engaged. It follows a young American couple driven into poverty by labor struggles, tracing their gradual awakening to union organizing and the psychological, philosophical, and political forces that draw them toward socialism and communism. As their understanding deepens, the novel charts a "slow vision" of class consciousness—an intimate portrayal of how ideology emerges from lived hardship.

Long out of print and never revived during Bodenheim's mid-century paperback resurgence, Slow Vision has been largely forgotten. This new edition restores a lost novel by a fiercely committed writer, inviting a long-overdue reevaluation of a body of work abandoned by literary history.

"A stirring and, in some ways, important book on the proletariat."
— Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

"Slow Vision is easily Maxwell Bodenheim's best novel, perhaps because he has now found something worthwhile to write about."
— The New Masses

"Slow Vision is decidedly the best of Bodenheim's novels, and it is symptomatic of what is happening at the present time in our American cities."
— The Daily Worker