Lawrence & Wishart

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Date began: 
01 Jan 1936
Precise date began unknown: 
Y
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About: 

Lawrence & Wishart is a London-based publishing company. It was formed in 1936 through the merger of the Communist Party’s official publisher, Martin Lawrence, and the liberal and anti-fascist family-owned publisher Wishart. From its foundation, it specialized in publishing left-wing political fiction, drama and poetry, as well as non-fiction such as working-class histories and the works of Karl Marx, in the context of the economic depression, and the rise of fascism and the Second World War. It also produced the bi-annual literary anthology New Writing. After the War, it went on to publish early work by renowned leftist scholars including Eric Hobsbawm and Edward Thompson, and to translate the work of Antonio Gramsci.

In 1935, Wishart had published Mulk Raj Anand’s novel The Untouchable after it was rejected by some nineteen publishing houses. Its acceptance by Wishart was no doubt in part a product of the novel’s endorsement by E. M. Forster. Two of Anand’s subsequent novels were then taken on by Lawrence & Wishart, as was the work of Indian Communist Rajani Palme Dutt’s, whose brother Clemens translated work by Marx and Engels for the firm.

Connections: 

Mulk Raj Anand, Clemens Palme Dutt, Rajani Palme Dutt, Friedrich Engels, E. M. Forster, Ralph Fox, J. B. S. Haldane, V. I. Lenin, Jack Lindsay, Karl Marx, Harry Pollitt, Montagu Slater, Joseph Stalin.

Other related organizations: 

Communist Party of Great Britain, New Writing.

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Published works: 

A selection of works published from 1936 to 1950:

Anand, Mulk Raj, Coolie (1936)

Anand, Mulk Raj, Two Leaves and a Bud (1937)

Beauchamp, Joan, Women Who Work (1937)

Britain Without Capitalists (1936)

Caudwell, Christopher, Illusion and Reality (1946)

Chen, Jack, Japan and the Pacific Theatre of War (1942)

Cornforth, Maurice, Science versus Idealism (1946)

Dutt, Rajani Palme, Britain in the World Front (1942)

Dutt, Rajani Palme, Britain’s Crisis of Empire (1950)

Engels, Friedrich, Dialectics of Nature, trans. Clemens Palme Dutt, preface by J. D. S. Haldane (1940)

Fox, Ralph, France Faces the Future (1936)

Gorky, Maksim, Culture and the People (1939)

Haldane, J. B. S., Science and Everyday Life (1939)

Klingender, Francis Donald, Marxism and Modern Art (1943)

Kuczynski, Jurgen, Hunger and Work: Statistical Studies (1938)

Lenin, V. I., Selected Works (1936-8)

Lenin, V. I., What is to be Done? (1944)

Lenin, V. I., Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1948)

Lindsay, Jack, A Handbook of Freedom (1939)

Marx, Karl, Selected Works, ed. by Clemens Palme Dutt (1942)

Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, Selected Correspondence, 1846-1895 (1941)

Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The Communist Manifesto [1933] (1948)

Pollitt, Harry, Serving My Time (1940)

Reeves, Joseph, A History of Rochdale Cooperation, 1844-1944 (19434)

Slater, Montagu, New Way Wins (1937)

Stalin, Joseph, Foundations of Leninism (1940)

Stalin, Joseph, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question (1947)

Wolton, Douglas G., Whither South Africa? (1947)