FRANK, WALDO DAVID

FRANK, WALDO DAVID (1889–1967), U.S. novelist, critic, and philosopher. Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, Frank was educated in Europe and at Yale. His early travels also took him to Latin America (where his books later enjoyed particular success). His father, an American-born son of German immigrants, was a wealthy and assimilated lawyer but Waldo Frank underwent a mystical reconversion to Judaism in 1920. His first published book was a novel, The Unwelcome Man (1917). He later made several outstanding experiments in poetic prose, such as Rahab (1922), City Block (1922), and Holiday (1923), the last a study of race relations in the South. A man of intellectual energy and literary skill, Frank wrote many books and essays evaluating American culture, notably Our America (1919), The Re-Discovery of America (1929), and In the American Jungle (1937). His books on other cultures include Virgin Spain (1926), America Hispana (1931), Dawn in Russia (1932), and Cuba, Prophetic Island (1961). As editor of the important, although short-lived, magazine Seven Arts (1916–17), which he founded with James Oppenheim, and of The New Republic (1925–40), Frank profoundly influenced American liberalism. His later writings were imbued with a prophetic and mystical philosophy that demanded the rejection of materialism and atheistic rationalism and the recognition of an immanent God. Frank also urged that private life should be guided by the ethical tenets of the Judeo-Christian tradition, enriched by the concepts of Marx and Freud. The Bridegroom Cometh (1938), a Marxist novel paradoxically inspired by Frank's religious beliefs, illustrates the author's conviction that the fundamental problem of the time was "how to transform the great traditional religious energies of Western civilization into modern social action." Two works by Frank on Jewish subjects are The Jew in Our Day (1944) and Bridgehead: The Drama of Israel (1957). The latter insisted on Messianism as the purpose of Jewish survival and on Jewry's mission of world redemption through the prophet Micah's principles of justice, mercy, and humility before God. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: G. Munson, Waldo Frank (1923); W.R. Bittner, Novels of Waldo Frank (1958); S. Liptzin, Jew in American Literature (1966), 223; R.L. Perry, Shared Vision of Waldo Frank and Hart Crane (1966); P.J. Carter, Waldo Frank (Eng., 1967). (Brom Weber)