Chevalier had visited France, where he managed to meet such left-wing literary figures as André Gide, André Malraux and Henri Barbusse. He returned to California convinced that he was destined “to witness the transition from a society based on the pursuit of profit and the exploitation of man by man to a society based on production for use and on human cooperation.” By 1934, he had translated André Malraux’s acclaimed novel of the Chinese uprising of 1927, La Condition Humaine (Man’s Fate) and his Le Temps du Mépris (The Time of Contempt), novels inspired by what Chevalier thought of as “the
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