Summary: Robert Cantwell - a writer who ran in the same New York literary circles as Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos - wrote "The Land of Plenty," a book many consider to be the first modern novel of the Pacific Northwest. Reed's new book "Robert Cantwell and the Literary Left" attempts to reclaim Cantwell's place in the canon of 20th-century American literature. The book also serves as a biography of Cantwell, who gave up his career as a novelist due, in part, to McCarthy-era politics that branded him as a communist sympathizer. Spokane writer Jess Walter authored the introduction to a recent reissue of Cantwell's "The Land of Plenty."
