Jack Conroy, 91, a Chicago proletarian poet, novelist and magazine editor in the 1930s and 1940s, wrote ”The Disinherited,” a loosely autobiographical novel about his life as a migrant worker in the 1920s. He also compiled
”Midland Humor,” a book that captured the light side of Midwestern writers.
Mr. Conroy, who had returned to his home town in Moberly, Mo., in 1966, died there Wednesday.
”He was different from almost all the other proletarian writers,” said Doug Wixson, who is writing his biography. ”He wrote from within the experience. He was not an educated writer with political sympathies for the downtrodden and the worker. He was one.”
Among other noted writers of that 1930s school were Albert Halper, Erskine Caldwell, Henry Roth, Thomas Bell, Robert Cantwell and, in the first of his novels, Nelson Algren.
Mr. Conroy was born in Moberly, a mining town. His father, who had been a Jesuit seminarian, died in a mine accident there as did a brother and a half- brother. His mother took him by the hand at age 13 to a railroad carshop to be apprenticed so he could avoid the same fate.
He became the recording secretary of the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen there at 15 because he could write. He was on his way to become a ”car toad,” or carman, when he lost his job in the railroad strike of 1922.
After migrating from job to job, he returned to Moberly to work as a construction worker in 1930. He had written a few articles and poems and founded ”The Rebel Poet Magazine.” It was read by H.L. Mencken, and his stories were published in American Mercury magazine.
He saw ”The Disinherited” published in 1933. It was highly praised as being alive with vigor and energy, according to Wixson. A new edition will soon be printed.
Mr. Conroy then became editor of The Anvil, a magazine devoted to the proletarian cause, and later of The New Anvil. He was the first to publish Richard Wright. Nelson Algren was managing editor of The New Anvil.
Mr. Conroy also participated with Algren, Studs Terkel, Saul Bellow and other noted Chicago writers in the Illinois WPA Writers Project.
He wrote ”A World to Win” in 1935 and co-authored ”They Seek a City”
with Arna Bontemps in 1944. The book is about blacks moving to the North and represented the first such major collaboration of white and black writers.
His years in Chicago were from 1938 to 1965. He was literary editor of the Chicago Defender from 1946 to 1947 and was senior editor of the New Standard Encyclopedia from 1947 to 1965. He also reviewed books for the Tribune and other publications.
Survivors include a son, Jack Jr., and three grandchildren.
Services will be held Friday in Moberly.
