Four Freedoms »

John Crowley lives in the hills of northern Massachusetts with his wife and twin daughters. He is the author of ten previous novels as well as the short fiction collection, Novelties & Souvenirs.

In the early years of the 1940s, as the nation's young men ship off to combat, a city springs up, seemingly overnight in the fields of Oklahoma: the Van Damme airplane factory, a gargantuan complex dedicated to the construction of the necessary machinery of warfare. Laborers—mostly women—flock to this place, enticed by the opportunity to be something more than wife and homemaker. For Vi, fleeing a dying ranch; for Connie, following an unfaithful husband; for Diane, leaving behind the hot music and soldier boys to pursue something different, adult, and real; their journeys will be liberating in ways they couldn't previously imagine, and it will lead each of them to Prosper Olander—disabled artist, forger, friend, lover, and the true heart and soul of the temporary city—who will change their lives in profound and unexpected ways.

The Barnes & Noble Review

In the 1943 RKO Radio Pictures film Tender Comrade -- to the dismay of ardent fans, the flick is generally unavailable these days except as a bootleg -- Ginger Rogers plays a war bride who sets up communal housekeeping with three other women, amid the dire physically and morally challenging conditions on the WWII home front. With a script by Dalton Trumbo, the film is an equal mix of soap opera, utopian socialism, and shared sacrifice leading to mass consciousness-raising. (In fact, the socialistic aspects of the script would later be used as a bludgeon in the infamous HUAC hearings.)

I have no doubt that novelist John Crowley, himself a screenwriter and well versed in the products of Hollywood's Golden Age, has watched, internalized, dissected, and mentally rejiggered Tender Comrade, as well as Dive Bomber (1941), This is the Army (1943), Since You Went Away (1944), Four Jills in a Jeep (1944), and any number of the other message-laden, heart-tugging, alternately bathetic and genuinely tragic propaganda films of this era. His novel Four Freedoms is too firmly implanted in this tradition to have sprung up spontaneously. Additionally, the comforting illusions provided by the cinema form an explicit thematic subtext in the book -- as how could they not, in any faithful literary re-creation of such a Hollywood-besotted time?