Harvey Swados (1920-1972) lived with his wife Bette Beller and children first in Valley Cottage, NY and in Amherst, Massachusetts from 1970. Cagnes-Sur-Mer in Southern France, mentioned numerous times in the present letters, was considered a second home. Harvey Swados had two principal passions: politics and literature. "By temperament and conviction he was a socialist...His belief in the possibilities of a just society was as primitive in faith as it was sophisticated in judgment" (Katz, Leslie, "Thoughts after Harvey Swados" in American Journal, 4-10-73). According to Swados: "I remain a social radical, at once dismayed and exhilarated by my seemingly doomed yet endlessly optimistic native land" (unpublished autobiography). "To call himself a socialist meant for Harvey most of all to preserve the power of moral responsiveness...It meant, as he wrote..., 'My kinship has been with those writers who imply, even as they treat of trouble and terror, that the world could be better just as my commitment has been to those human beings who believe-despite every awful evidence to the contrary-that the world must be better'" (Howe, Irving, "Harvey Swados 1920-1972" in Dissent, Spring 1973). His papers are held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Robin Swados (b. 1953) has had a long and varied career as a playwright, prose writer, editor, copy editor, and copywriter. Trained as a classical pianist, following studies in Amherst and in London at the acting academy Studio '68 of Theater Arts, Swados began his acting career in Manhattan in 1975 and moved to Los Angeles in 1978, where he spent six years acting in theater and television, before returning to New York in 1984, soon abandoning his acting career and turning to writing. His first play, A Quiet End, was first performed at the London 1985 Gay Sweatshop theater festival, has subsequently been produced at many theaters across the United States, and has been published by Samuel French, Inc. and anthologized in Gay & Lesbian Plays Today. From 1988 to 1999, Swados was an editor at Knopf and Doubleday, later working as an independent travel writer, copy editor and copywriter.
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