Dark Matters: A Novel

Paul M. Levitt

Set in the Southwest against the backdrop of McCarthyism, this novel combines the political and the love affairs of Ben Cohen, torn between a wealthy Kentucky belle and a New Mexico union organizer. Ben is a student at the University of Colorado, where the president is dismissing faculty and staff for allegedly maintaining subversive associations and opinions. The staff is supportive of the Salt of the Earth strike in Hanover, New Mexico. When members of the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Union arrive in Denver to raise money for the strikers, Ben meets Esperanza Morales, devoutly Catholic and unhappily married. Soon they are desperately in love.

Dark Matters also looks at the political parallels between the McCarthyist United States and the antidemocratic behavior of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries. In a postscript set in Prague, 1969, we see the suppression of the Dubcek government by the Soviets and their allies. Sociologists say that similar groups and governments define themselves by exaggerating their differences. McCarthyism and Communism, for all the vitriol of their opposition, had much in common, as this novel shows through two passionate love stories.

"Paul Levitt has written a fascinating and totally engrossing book. His many and varied characters are real and invoke the readers caring concern from the very first moments each one is introduced."--Southwest BookViews

"Set in Colorado and New Mexico against the backdrop of McCarthyism, Levitt's story revolves around Ben Cohen, a veteran of the Korean war with socialist leanings who enrolls at the University of Colorado, where he becomes embroiled in the campus political struggle."--Rocky Mountain News

Paul M. Levitt teaches in the department of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is also the author of Chin Music: A Novel of the Jazz Age and numerous books for younger readers and scholars.

6 x 9 310 pages