Louis Adamic

Louis Adamic (born March 23, 1898?, Blato, Slovenia, Austria-Hungary [now in Slovenia]—died September 4, 1951, near Riegelsville, New Jersey, U.S.) was a novelist and journalist who wrote in the 1930s and ’40s about the experiences of minority communities in the United States, especially immigrants.

Adamic was born in 1898 (which is widely used as his birth year) or 1899 (which he claimed during his lifetime and which appears on his gravestone). He immigrated to the United States as a teenager and later became a naturalized citizen. Adamic wrote about what he called the failure of the American melting pot in Laughing in the Jungle (1932). He traveled to Yugoslavia on a Guggenheim fellowship and wrote about the experience in The Native’s Return (1934), the story of a man who finds he cannot slip comfortably into his former life as a peasant. Two successful sequels, Grandsons (1935) and Cradle of Life (1936), were followed by his first novel, The House in Antigua (1937). His following book, My America (1938), a mixture of memoir and social philosophy, outlines his dream of a unified American people.

Adamic believed America had great potential but that tensions between minority groups and the status quo were near crisis. Starting in 1940, he edited Common Ground, a magazine that analyzed the interracial culture of the United States.

An intensely political man, Adamic suffered greatly over the fragmentation and occupation of Yugoslavia in World War II, and he supported Josip Broz Tito’s communist movement both during and after the war. Adamic was found shot to death in 1951, with a rifle in his hands; murder was suspected because of his political views, but the official cause of death was finally determined to be suicide caused by overwork and anxiety.