page_title: Richard Plant (writer)
section_title: Career in New York (1938–1973)
hierarchical_section_title: Richard Plant (writer) / Career in New York (1938–1973)
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover page of Decision: A Review of Free Culture, vol. 1, no. 1 (January 1941), an antifascist journal edited by Klaus Mann. This issue featured contributions by Sherwood Anderson, Wystan H. Auden, Max Ascoli, Stephen Vincent Benét, Henri Bernstein, Ernest Boyd, Jean Cocteau, Janet Flanner, Horace Gregory, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Frank Kingdon, Heinrich Mann, Karin Michaëlis, Bruno Walter, Franz Werfel, and Stefan Zweig.
context_page_description: Richard Plant was a gay Jewish emigre from Nazi Germany first to Switzerland and then to the U.S. who became a professor at the City University of New York, where he taught German language and literature from 1947 to 1973. He authored an opera scenario as well a number of fictional and non-fictional works, notably The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals.
context_section_description: Following their 1938 arrival in New York, Plaut Americanized his name to Richard Rene Plant, and Koplowitz changed his name to Seidlin. They coauthored S.O.S. Geneva, an English-language young readers' book with a cosmopolitan and pacifistic theme published in October 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II. Through the Friendship House, Plant developed first contacts with native New Yorkers, and he also sought employment by networking within New York's burgeoning community of German emigres, some of whom communicated in the pages of the left-wing German Jewish weekly Aufbau. During 1941–42 he was employed by the recently arrived emigre Klaus Mann as an editorial assistant for the antifascist journal Decision, and he also worked for the recently arrived emigre Siegfried Kracauer. Following the American entry into World War II, Plant finally found full-time employment for three years as a propaganda scriptwriter, translator, and broadcaster for the U.S. Office of War Information and for NBC. He enjoyed life as a gay man during the war years, which brought a steady stream of unattached young men in uniform to New York. He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen on January 29, 1945.
  Following the end of World War II, Plant and his friends went separate ways when Seidlin and Cunz held professorships in German studies in Massachusetts and Maryland, respectively, and later, together as a gay couple, at Ohio State University, where they rose to considerable prominence (in a signal honor, OSU's building for foreign languages and literatures was posthumously named after Cunz). Plant remained in New York, where in 1947 he was hired by the City College of the City University of New York. To complete work on his highly autobiographical novel The Dragon in the Forest (1948), Plant was awarded a Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Trust Fellowship, for which he was recommended by Norman Cousins. The book centers on a young man growing up in Frankfurt who is witness to the rise of the Nazis and whose best boyhood friend becomes a victim of Fritz Haarmann. Critical reception was mixed.
  From time to time Plant's book reviews on current German fiction, including the novels of Thomas Mann, Heinrich Böll, and Günter Grass, were published in the New York Times, Saturday Review, The Nation, Esquire, and other periodicals. In 1957, he published a collection of stories by Böll edited and annotated for use in German language instruction. In 1970, he coedited a second, more widely adopted reader for intermediate-level college instruction. Although he was successful enough as a classroom teacher to be granted tenure in 1957 and promotion to full professor in 1970, Plant struggled with condescending colleagues who disparaged his lack of scholarly publications while pooh-poohing his editorial and journalistic contributions. He resided in Greenwich Village, and summer holidays were spent with his friends Seidlin and Cunz in the mountains at Mallnitz, Austria, or on the beach at Manomet, Massachusetts, where they hobnobbed with the vacationing Hannah Arendt.
  In 1956, Plant published an essay and the first of five short stories under the pseudonym Orlando Gibbons in the Swiss gay periodical Der Kreis. The essay commented on the anti-gay dimension of the McCarthy witch hunt of the preceding years, while the stories "are charming, happy-ending vignettes of gay life in New York City and Massachusetts, two of them with interesting black/white encounters. Especially touching is the story of a white boy who, despite his Southern upbringing, discovers that he can love a black man." The year 1965 saw the premiere of the opera Lizzie Borden, for which Plant had written the scenario. He regarded this as one of his foremost accomplishments.
caption: The antifascist journal Decision (1941)
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