Max Forrester Eastman (January 4, 1883 – March 25, 1969) was an American writer on literature, philosophy, and society, a poet, and a prominent political activist.

This area was part of the "burned-over district", which earlier in the 19th century had generated much religious excitement, resulting in the founding of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and the Latter Day Saint movement.

His good friend and roommate while at Williams was Charles Whittlesey, later known as the Lost Battalion commanding officer and a World War I hero.

Settling in Greenwich Village with his older sister Crystal Eastman, he became involved in political causes, including helping to found the Men's League for Women's Suffrage in 1910.

Its contributors during his tenure included Sherwood Anderson, Louise Bryant, Floyd Dell, Amy Lowell, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Robert Minor, John Reed, Carl Sandburg, Upton Sinclair, and Art Young.

[3]The numerous denunciations of US participation in World War I published in The Masses, many written by Eastman, provoked controversy and reaction from authorities.

In a July 1917 speech, he complained that the government's aggressive prosecutions of dissent meant that "[y]ou can't even collect your thoughts without getting arrested for unlawful assemblage".

His magazine published Reed's articles from Russia, later collected as Ten Days That Shook the World, his notable account of the Bolshevik Revolution.

[6] In 1919, Eastman and his sister Crystal (who the next year was one of the founders of American Civil Liberties Union) created a similar publication titled The Liberator.

They published such writers as E. E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, Claude McKay and Edmund Wilson.

Upon returning to the United States in 1927, Eastman published several works that were highly critical of the Stalinist system, beginning with "Since Lenin Died", which was written in 1925.

In the 1930s, he debated the meaning of Marxism with the philosopher Sidney Hook (like Eastman, he had studied under John Dewey at Columbia University) in a series of public exchanges.

[12] Defunct Newspapers Journals TV channels Websites Other Congressional caucuses Economics Gun rights Identity politics Nativist Religion Watchdog groups Youth/student groups Miscellaneous Other Hegelism is like a mental disease—you cannot know what it is until you get it, and then you can't know because you've got it.Following the Great Depression, Eastman started to abandon his socialist beliefs, becoming increasingly critical of the ideas of Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whom he had once admired.

About this time, he also became a friend and admirer of the noted free market economists Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Wilhelm Röpke.

[13] Nobel laureate economist Hayek referred to Eastman's life and to his repudiation of socialism in his widely read The Road to Serfdom.

Later, Eastman wrote articles critical of socialism for The Freeman, an early libertarian publication edited by his friends John Chamberlain and Henry Hazlitt.

[14] Initially, Eastman had supported the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and Senator Joseph McCarthy's public attacks on the influence of communism.

In the early 1950s, Eastman's anti-communist articles in the Reader's Digest, The Freeman, and the National Review played an important role in what became known as McCarthyism.

In the 1960s, he broke with his friend William F. Buckley Jr. and resigned from the National Review's Board of Associates on the grounds that the magazine was too explicitly pro-Christian.

He wielded some influence in conservative and anti-communist circles, through organizations like the American Committee for Cultural Freedom and magazines like National Review, but he was essential to none of them.

His memoirs, Enjoyment of Living in 1948 and Love and Revolution in 1964, were interesting as documents of his age, and for their unusual frankness about sex, but they weren't great books.

[21]A prolific writer, Eastman published more than twenty books on subjects as diverse as the scientific method, humor, Freudian psychology and Soviet culture as well as memoirs and recollections of his noted friendships.

His biographical portraits have been called "brilliant" and his psychological study of the young Leon Trotsky "pioneering" by the historian John Patrick Diggins.

Eastman also wrote two volumes of memoirs as well as two volumes of recollections of his friendships and personal encounters with many of the leading figures of his time, including Pablo Casals, Charlie Chaplin, Eugene Debs, John Dewey, Isadora Duncan, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, H. L. Mencken, John Reed, Paul Robeson, Bertrand Russell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, George Santayana, E. W. Scripps, George Bernard Shaw, Carlo Tresca, Leon Trotsky, Mark Twain, and H. G. Wells.

After moving to New York City, Eastman married Ida Rauh in 1911, a lawyer, actress, writer, fellow radical and early feminist.