there were so few left

"Nelson [Algren] felt even more isolated among his own generation of radicals because there were so few left. Richard Wright was dead, and no one had heard from Abe Aaron in more than twenty years. Jack Conroy, whom Nelson wasn't speaking to, had retired and returned to Moberly, Missouri, and everyone else had either joined him in obscurity or switched sides. John Dos Passos, one of the most important left-wing writers of the thirties, had become a conservative and a Richard Nixon supporter. John Steinbeck had recently traveled to Vietnam and sent back dispatches praising the war effort. Even Frank Meyer--the Communist Party functionary who scolded Nelson for lacking discipline in 1940--had become a contributor to the National Review and a close friend of William F. Buckley's."

~~ from Colin Asher's Never A Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren