THAT SPRING was when it began. I’ve found a notebook from that time, and it’s full of a new passion. There are jottings about steelworkers walking off a job, tools held high (I’d read about that), about a job in a cement factory in the dead of winter and its hardships (I’d not suffered this cold), about construction workers on payday shooting craps in a half-finished building (I’d seen this but from a students distance), about “hobo jungles” (I’d never seen one), and there’s a long, ardent defense of the Bonus Army: “Those men came to Washington because they had nowhere else to go and were as willing to starve on the road as in the streets of the cities they call home.” (I’d never been hungry.) Then: “You’re breaking my heart, fellow, go starve somewhere else!”—dialogue to be attributed to the villains of the Hoover government or someone on General MacArthur’s staff.

[...]

But that spring it was all romance. By the time I went to Green Mansions in June, I was ready for the Communist Party.