Louis Adamic. Louis Adamic (Slovene: Alojz Adamič) (23 March 1898 – 4 September 1951) was a Slovene-American author and translator, mostly known for writing about and advocating for ethnic diversity of America. He was both a novelist and journalist who wrote about the experience of American minorities, especially immigrants, in the early 1900s.
Steven was especially taken by the book *My America (1928-1938) – by Louis Adamic who describes his book as covering New York, on being of two worlds, Ellis Island and my interest in the immigrants, the 1930s depression, the workers and the growth of the CIO, portraits of Robinson Jeffers, Mary Austin, and Cleveland’s Wasp of Virtue.
Adamic believed America had great potential but that tensions between ethnic minorities and the status quo were near crisis. Starting in 1940 he edited Common Ground, a magazine that analyzed the interracial culture of the United States.
Louis Adamic promoted the poem by Emma Lazarus at the Statue of Liberty. See transcript of interview on DN about Emma Lazarus’s poem. Add details from that transcript of a Democracy Now interview. (interview in the Statue of Liberty file in RC.
Adamic met a strange death. An intensely political man, Adamic suffered greatly over the fragmentation and occupation of Yugoslavia in World War II, and he supported Josip Broz Tito’s communist movement both during and after the war. Adamic was found shot to death, with a rifle in his hands; murder was suspected because of his political views, but the official cause of death was finally determined to be suicide caused by overwork and anxiety.