Anthony Arthur was a professor emeritus of literature at California State University, Northridge, and the author of five books, including three on twentieth-century American culture, politics, and history. Two of them were History Book Club and Military Book Club selections. The third, Literary Feuds, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in 2002. He was the author of Radical Innocent, a biography of Upton Sinclair, and also the co-author of Clashes of Willi: Confrontations That Have Shaped Modern America. Anthony Arthur died in 2009, shortly after finishing this book.
Anthony Arthur is a Fulbright Scholar and the author of Deliverance at Los Banos and Bushmaster, both narrative histories of World War II. He is also the author of The Tailor-King: The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Munster. Anthony Arthur lives in Woodland Hills, California, where for many years he has taught writing and literature at California State University, Northridge.
I ran across Radical Innocent at Borders a couple of months ago, and managed to obtain a review copy from Random House. Anthony Arthur is a Professor Emeritus who taught American literature at California State University at Northridge for over thirty years. In the Prologue to Radical Innocent, Arthur refers to a long and compelling talk given by the eighty-five year old Sinclair at Indiana University in 1963. Although I surmised that Arthur must have been in the audience for this occasion, he doesn't say so in the narrative, and his online bio suggests that he was not. Without that vital connection, I cannot say with any certainty what prompted him to undertake this particular piece of work.
