Hicks, Granville (1901-1982). American critic and writer. Born in New Hampshire, the only child of Frank and Carrie Hicks, Granville Hicks earned a BA (1923) and MA (1929) from Harvard University and briefly studied for the ministry. He taught biblical literature at Smith College from 1926-28, English at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from 1929-35 (he believed he was dismissed for his political views), and American Civilization at Harvard from 1938 to 1939. Drawn to Marxist ideas, he became literary editor of the New Masses and joined the American Communist Party in 1934. Under the sway of Marxist thought, he became a strident critic of what he saw as Cather’s escapism, including in a review of Shadows on the Rock (1931) in the Forum, “The Case Against Willa Cather” in the English Journal (1933), and in The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature since the Civil War (1933). Cather was under the misapprehension that Hicks had a brother who was also a leftist literary critic. Hicks broke with the Communist party in 1939, upon the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact. After his firing from RPI, Hicks and his wife Dorothy Dyer and their daughter, Stephanie, moved to Grafton, NY, and his book Small Town (1946) made him a notable proponent of rural small-town life, and he was actively anti-communist during the 1950s. He died in Franklin Park, NJ.