Carlos Bulosan

One of the earliest and most influential of Asian American writers, Bulosan emigrated from the Philippines in 1931. In the U.S., he worked in an Alaskan fish cannery and as a fruit and vegetable picker in Washington and California, and eventually became an activist in the labor movement. The horrendous conditions of Filipino laborers were fictionalized in his most famous work, America Is in the Heart (1946). Excerpts of his 1944 book, Laughter of My Father, were published in The New Yorker and Harper's Bazaar. Bulosan was commissioned by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1945 to write “Four Freedoms,” an essay for the Federal Building in San Francisco. Because of his radical activism, Bulosan was blacklisted by Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the anti-Communist movement of the 1950s. His other books include the poetry collections Letter from America (1942), Chorus from America (1942), and The Voice of Bataan (1943), as well as the novels The Cry and the Dedication (written in the 1950s and published posthumously in 1995) and The Sound of Falling Light (1960).