Every year the Nelson Algren Committee honors one or more Chicagoans who exemplify Algren’s ideal of “a conscience in touch with humanity.” Among this year’s recipients of the Nelson Algren Committee Awards are Franklin and Penelope Rosemont of the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company www.CharlesHKerr.org).

 The Kerr Company is not only Chicago’s oldest publishing house (established 1886), but also the world’s oldest publisher of dissident, nonconformist, and workingclass literature. Noted for its important works on labor history, socialism, the IWW, freethought, anarchism, feminism, animal rights, surrealism, and workingclass culture, Kerr has never ceased to uphold its aim to publish “Books for a Better World.” John P. Altgeld, Slim Brundage, James Connolly, Carlos Cortez, Clarence Darrow, Eugene Debs, Dave Dellinger, Hubert Harrison, Big Bill Haywood, Paul Garon, Joe Hill, C.L.R. James, Mary “Mother” Jones, Robin D. G. Kelley, Peter Kropotkin, Paul Lafargue, Warren Leming, Jack London, Staughton Lynd, Vachel Lindsay, Mary MacLane, Mary E. Marcy, Karl Marx, Claude McKay, Gustavus Myers, Lucy Parsons, Wendell Phillips, David Roediger, Ron Sakolsky, Carl Sandburg, T-Bone Slim, Fred Thompson, and Oscar Wilde are just a few of the authors of Charles H. Kerr books. The Rosemonts joined the Kerr Company Board of Directors in the mid-1970s, encouraged by their old friend Fred Thompson, the IWW’s in-house historian, who had helped revive the financially-strapped firm earlier in the decade. With the help of attorney Leon M. Despres and several young newcomers to the Board, the revitalized Kerr Company attracted increasing attention in the labor and activist press. By 1986, the firm’s centennial—when The Newberry Library purchased the Kerr Archives—people began to notice that Kerr was not only the oldest left publisher, but also one of the fastest-growing. Chicago’s hidden history—the history of working people—is a major focus of many Kerr publications. This is precisely the kind of history that Nelson Algren championed. Kerr’s specialties include 1880s “Chicago Idea” anarchism, the Haymarket Affair, the IWW (founded in Chicago in 1905), and the city’s incomparable blue-collar counterculture. The lavishly-illustrated Haymarket Scrapbook (1986) is a standard reference, and Utah Phillips has calledFranklin’s book on Joe Hill “the best book ever written on the subject.” Kerr’s in-print IWW-related titles outnumber those of all other U.S. publishers put together. And its “Bughouse Square Series” features books on our city’s free-speech tradition, exemplified by such venues as the Dil Pickle Club and the College of Complexes. Franklin’s and Penelope’s involvement in social and cultural radicalism started long before they joined the Kerr Company. Chicago-born, of workingclass families, both were active as teenagers in the 1950s “Beat” ferment as well as the civil-rights and “Ban-the-Bomb” movements. When they met at Roosevelt University in 1964, they and their friends were regarded by “Old Left” students as the “Left Wing of the Beat Generation.” As card-carrying members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), they were part of a lively group known as the “R.U. Wobblies,” the subject of a boisterous free-speech fight that made headlines. Outside of school the group also produced a lively mimeographed magazine, The Rebel Worker, and ran the Chicago IWW’s Solidarity Bookshop in the then-flourishing slum of Lincoln Park. An earlier group of mostly the same folks, the Roosevelt University “Anti-Poetry Club”—scorners not of poetry, but of the stuffy Poetry Club—also made the daily papers, and incidentally marked the Rosemonts’ first encounter with Nelson Algren, who phoned the school’s Student Activities Office to tell them that the report of the Club’s formation was “the best news I’ve heard in years.” That exciting period is chronicled in the latest Kerr title, Dancin’ in the Streets: Anarchists, IWWs, Surrealists, Situationists & Provos in the 1960s, as recorded in the pages of The Rebel Worker & Heatwave. Above all, Franklin and Penelope Rosemont are poets, writers, and artists. In 1965 they went to Paris to meet poet André Breton, who welcomed them into the Surrealist Group. In 1966, with Breton’s and other Surrealists’ support, they organized the first indigenous Surrealist Group in the U.S., in Chicago (www.surrealistmovement-usa.org). Recognized for its originality,innovation, and perseverance by writers as different as Algren, Luis Buňuel, Leonora Carrington, Rikki Ducornet, Herbert Marcuse and Octavio Paz, the Chicago surrealist Group has in turn inspired the formation of other surrealist groups—in Australia, England, Spain, Sweden, and most recently in Chile and Greece. Their poetry and other writings, which have appeared in surrealist journals throughout the world, and in book-form under many imprints (including several by City Lights) have been translated into French, Spanish, Arabic, Czech, Italian, German, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Swedish, Danish, Turkish, and other languages. Penelope’s Surrealist Women anthology (University of Texas, 1998) was the first book of its kind in any language. Since the first Chicago Surrealist Group Show at the Gallery Bugs Bunny in 1968, the Rosemonts have participated in many important surrealist exhibitions in France, England, Mexico, Portugal, the Czech Republic and other countries, and helped organize the massive World Surrealist Exhibition in Chicago in 1976. They have also organized many local shows. Their “Surrealism in 1977” show in Gary, Indiana was the first anywhere to exhibit works by Henry Darger, long since regarded as one of the greatest of all outsider artists. In 1986 Penelope’s work was featured at the Venice Biennale “Art and Alchemy” exhibition (curated by Arturo Schwarz), and in 2000 the Chicago Jazz Institute selected one of her paintings for the official Jazz Festival t-shirt. Franklin is currently editor of the University of Texas Press Surrealist Revolution Series. The Rosemonts also contributed to The Encyclopedia of the American Left, The Encyclopedia of Chicago, and The Encyclopedia Britannica. Both are active in The Newberry Library Bughouse Square Committee. References “‘Surrealism? In Chicago?’ Talks with Nelson Algren,” in Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion. Chicago: Black Swan Press, 1989, pp. 50-51. The Forecast Is Hot! Tracts & Other Collective Declarations of the Surrealist Movement in the United States:1966-1976, edited by Franklin Rosemont, Penelope Rosemont and Paul Garon. Chicago: Black Swan Press, 1997. Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, edited & introduced by Penelope Rosemont. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. Ça va chauffer! Situation du Surréalisme aux U.S.A. (1966-2001), by Guy Ducornet. Mons: Editions Talus d’approche, 2001. Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings & Images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States, edited & introduced by Ron Sakolsky. New York: Autonomedia, 2002. “Wobblies in the ‘60s: The Rebel Worker & Heatwave,” in Wobblies: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World, edited by Paul Buhle and Nicole Schulman. Ne York & London: Verso, 2005. Dancin’ in the Streets: Anarchists, IWWs, Surrealists, Situationists & Provos in the 1960s, as recorded in the pages of The Rebel Worker and Heatwave (Kerr, 2005). Edited & introduced by Franklin Rosemont and Charles Radcliffe. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2005.

homepage:: http://www.charleshkerr.org phone:: 773-465-7774

add a comment on this article