Avrom Landy

Avrom Landy (AKA "A. Landy", 1904–1992) was a historian, writer and theorist on American Marxism in the first half of the twentieth century. He was the father of the American artist and researcher professor emeritus of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Sonia Landy Sheridan.

Background

Landy was born in Cleveland, Ohio and received a B.A. from Ohio State University and Master of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Ph.D. in history, philology, the philosophy of language, at Madison University.

Career At that time he was appointed to the Daily Worker as editor. He was city editor for the Daily Worker for about two years in the early 1930s. He was co-publisher of International Publishers from 1945 until about 1947, when he left the Communist Party. Landy was an influential Marxist thinker during the 1930s and 1940s, especially through his educational and editorial work, and also through his articles in various leftist journals.

He taught at both Phi Beta Kappa- Ohio State University and The University of Wisconsin.

Landy orientated his daughter Sonia to become a translator in global politics, and he hired her to do the French research for his new book The United States and the Paris Commune of 1871.

With the four time election of President Franklin Roosevelt, Landy joined Earl Browder, head of the CPUSA, in believing that the USA was on its own historical destiny, a democratic mix of socialism and capitalism.

Legacy His archives and documents are at the Northwestern University library "A.Landy Collection" and at the Langlois Foundation, along with his daughter Sonia Landy Sheridan archives in the Sonia's Langlois Foundation Generative Systems records in Montreal, Canada. Marxism and the Woman Question (New York: Worker's Library, 1943).

Articles "A Year of American Slav Unity," The Communist (1943)