Thomas McGrath - Beginnings

The year 2016, when this exhibit originally was put on display, marked the centenary of the poet Thomas McGrath (1916-1990), who, in addition to being an acclaimed poet, was also a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, a WWII soldier and international spy, a dockworker and machinist, a radical leftist activist and organizer, a victim of the McCarthy-era blacklist, and a member of the English Department faculty at Los Angeles State College (now Cal State LA).

Born in North Dakota, McGrath and his work are primarily associated with the American Midwest. However, the decade McGrath spent in Los Angeles during the 1950s was formative – especially his firing from LASC after being blacklisted amid the anti-Communist hysteria of that time. Despite that setback, he remained a leader of the Los Angeles poetry scene and went on to receive considerable critical acclaim, especially for a long autobiographical poem (Letter to an Imaginary Friend) that he began in 1954 amid the tumult and depression following his firing, and upon which he worked for three decades thereafter. The poem simultaneously registers McGrath’s persistent faith in what he called the “holy city” of community and shared creativity, and his disappointment with the real Los Angeles in which he found himself adrift. That Los Angeles he regarded as a "demonic" place that often perverted humankind's impulse toward collective praxis, substituting instead the superficial values of profit and conformity.

Letter has been described by one commentator, Frederick Stern, as a “first-rate piece of work, by our single best radical poet, and without any qualifiers, by one of our best poets." Historian E.P. Thompson predicted that “McGrath’s poetry will be remembered in one hundred years when many more fashionable voices have been forgotten.” Beginning that remembrance a bit early, this exhibition explores how McGrath’s Los Angeles years transformed the man and his work, and investigates the mark he in turn left on Los Angeles and Cal State LA.