Alexander Saxton

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Alexander Plaisted Saxton (July 16, 1919 – August 20, 2012) was an American historian, novelist, and university professor. He wrote Indispensable Enemy (1975), an important early work in Asian American studies.

Life and work
- Saxton was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the son of Eugene and Martha Saxton. He grew up in Manhattan with an older brother, Mark Saxton. His father was the editor of Harper & Brothers, and his mother taught literature.
- He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard but left in his junior year to work in Chicago. He wanted to see how people lived in the “real America.”
- Saxton worked as a laborer and in various other roles, including as a writer for The Daily Worker. He published his first novel, Grand Crossing, in 1943 at age 24. His next novel, The Great Midland (1948), looks at the labor movement in the 1920s and 1930s. His 1958 novel Bright Web in the Darkness focuses on two women who meet in a factory during World War II. He did not return to writing novels for long after that.
- During World War II he served with the Merchant Marines. After the war, publishers were reluctant to publish his fiction because of his left-wing activities.
- He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago and, later, a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley. He then became a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Academic career and impact
- Saxton helped found the UCLA Asian American Studies Center and created new courses, including the first courses on Filipino-American history and on film and history.
- He became well known for Indispensable Enemy (1975), a foundational text in Asian American studies.
- Claire Potter later wrote that Saxton was one of the first historians to explore how whiteness formed as a European-descended working-class identity in California and how anti-immigrant sentiments helped support capitalist interests in the region.
- He taught American history at UCLA from 1968 until his retirement in 1990.

Personal life and death
- Saxton had two daughters; one died in 1990 and another in 2019. His wife, Trudy, died around 2002.
- He died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Lone Pine, California, on August 20, 2012. His daughter said he chose the time and place of his death.

Selected works
- Grand Crossing (1943)
- The Great Midland (1948)
- Bright Web in the Darkness (1958)
- The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (1975)
- The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America (1991)
- Religion and the Human Prospect (2006)