INTRUDERS IN PARADISE.<i> By John Sanford</i>...

Poet, novelist, screenwriter and law school graduate, John Sanford defies conventional classification. He is a prolific though neglected writer whose 20-odd books include a remarkable series of meditations on the American past. A self-taught historian, Sanford possesses qualities unusual even among professionals: an eye for the telling detail or incident that opens up an entire world of meaning, an ability to plumb the inner thoughts and emotions of figures in the past and a genuine concern for society’s outcasts and underdogs. Most of all, from his first book, published in 1933, to his latest, which appears in his 94th year, his writing is energized by that rare commodity nowadays, a capacity for indignation. One hopes that “Intruders in Paradise,” the fifth volume of his ongoing ruminations on history, will bring Sanford the attention he so richly deserves.

Sanford’s writings persistently transgress the boundaries of style and genre. In “The View from Mt. Morris” (1994), a memoir of his own childhood in New York’s Harlem when it was a center of Jewish life, he intersperses the experiences his future wife, Marguerite Roberts, then growing up in Nebraska. Through Sanford’s imagination, Maggie becomes part of his world long before they actually met in the 1930s, when Sanford moved to Hollywood.

History is as central to Sanford’s fiction as informed speculation and creative invention are to his histories. His 1943 novel “The People From Heaven” (recently reissued in paperback), in which a black woman victimized by bigots takes violent revenge on her tormentors, contains digressions that seek the roots of modern-day racism in the experiences of Columbus and Pocahontas and the events of the American Revolution and the Civil War. (When he wrote the book, Sanford was a Communist but too independent-minded to follow any line; the party’s literary authorities condemned the book as “antisocial.”)

A collection of vignettes and pen portraits, “Intruders in Paradise,” like all of Sanford’s writings, is grounded in a deep knowledge of American history and a compelling if disquieting vision of the country’s past. Capitalism, Karl Marx famously observed, came into the world dripping with blood. And blood frames Sanford’s history of the Americas. He begins with a sketch of Valverde, chaplain to the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro, who participated in and sanctified the massacre of thousands of Incas in the town square of Caxamarca. Accounts soon follow of the brutal torture of a Catholic priest by members of the Iroquois and of the bloody slave revolution in Haiti led by Toussaint L’Ouverture. Near the end is a vivid evocation of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

The violent dispossession of the New World’s native inhabitants, Sanford seems to be saying, established a pattern recapitulated in the enslavement of Africans and the dehumanization of wartime enemies. It also presaged a long history of disregard for nature, a theme epitomized by Sanford’s vignette about a man who, on a bet, labored for a month to cut down the oldest tree in North America. In such a world, no one can claim to be innocent. But Sanford makes clear that his sympathies lie with the outcasts, migrants and rebels, the subjects of most of his brief tales.

Compared to traditional works of history, Sanford’s cast of characters is deliberately off-center. At one point, he deconstructs, as it were, the parade of heroes in John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Profiles in Courage.” Rather than Lucius Q.C. Lamar, the racist politician from Mississippi, or Daniel Webster, who defended the Fugitive Slave Law, Kennedy, Sanford suggests, could have found genuine heroism in “any Indian, any organizer, any black or Jew, any mick who fled the Famine,” or in Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the immigrant anarchists executed “in Jack’s backyard.”

Kennedy chose to profile only “members of the Club.” Sanford’s subjects include the outlaw Billy the Kid, the anti-religious crusader Robert Ingersoll (perhaps the 19th century’s most popular orator) and socialist leader Eugene V. Debs. What interests Sanford is not so much Debs’ ideology as his empathy for the common man and how, through force of character and basic decency, he won the respect of fellow inmates while imprisoned for opposing American participation in World War I.

In “Intruders in Paradise,” we encounter George Washington through Tobias Lear, his private secretary. We meet not John Brown but his second wife, who remained on their farm with her 13 children, “slaving for her family” while her husband battled slavery on the plains of Kansas. There are victims of political persecution like Paul Robeson and a “fink,” Ben Maddow, who named names to escape the Hollywood blacklist that caught both Sanford and his wife in its net. Each episode is humane, penetrating and often poignant.

Sanford asks questions rarely encountered in conventional works of history. What happened, he wonders, to the first black cadet nominated to West Point, who disappeared from the historical record after failing the entrance exam in 1870? “Did he wind up a waiter, a porter, prat-boy in a house of ill fame?” Through Matthew Henson, the black explorer who accompanied Robert Perry to the North Pole, Sanford explores the workings of racism. After their return from braving Arctic hardships together, Perry declared himself too busy to attend a dinner in Henson’s honor given by New York blacks. Later, while Perry was showered with honors, Henson found employment as a “custom house messenger-boy” (the pregnant italics driving home Sanford’s point).

Race is central to Sanford’s historical vision, and his account is certainly up to date in its pluralism (he even includes sketches of Pancho Villa, Fidel Castro, Eva Peron and others whose lives suggest that American history over-spills the nation’s Southern boundary). But Sanford does not, like many multiculturalists, allow awareness of racial and ethnic diversity to obscure the centrality of class. Sacco and Vanzetti are here, as are the working-class victims of the Johnstown flood, who perished when a dam burst on a lake where capitalism’s robber barons--Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, Henry Clay Frick--gathered for hunting parties. When prominent political figures make their appearance, it is to underscore the relationship between economic and political power. Sanford’s vignette of James Madison captures both the physical presence of the father of the Constitution (“strange the command he had for one so unimposing”) and his ambition to craft a system of government structured so those fated to “labor under the hardships of life” could never threaten the property of the rich.

Unusual in works by male writers, Sanford’s vignettes of women are generally more vivid and insightful than his portraits of men. He has a remarkable ability to illuminate women’s place in history and to crystallize their innermost feelings. These qualities make the third volume in his history saga, “A Book of American Women,” originally published in 1980 and reissued two years ago, the most powerful and evocative of the entire series. In “Intruders,” his female subjects exemplify endurance, rebellion and, in some cases, triumph over adversity. They include Ella Mae Wiggins, a textile striker murdered by company gunmen in Gastonia, N.C., and Frida Kahlo and Alicia Alonso, the Mexican painter and the Cuban dancer, who are paired to show how each pursued her art in the face of debilitating physical infirmities. His encounter with a homeless woman, all her earthly belongings contained in a shopping cart, inspires Sanford not to turn away but to muse on what mementos--tattered letters, long-forgotten invitations, perhaps a Bible--she transports from place to place.

Through women, Sanford also explores a world of private intimacy that often eludes him when discussing men. He is fascinated by the nature of love--between men and women, women and women and especially the love that lives in memory after the reality of loss. He re-creates Willa Cather’s powerful feelings for Isabelle McClung and her devastation when Isabelle marries. He touchingly describes how “the magic of memory” enables Jesse Fremont to survive the death of her dashing husband, John Charles Fremont, after 50 years of marriage. The same magic of memory makes Sanford’s wife, Maggie, who died in 1989, a living presence in the book, commenting from time to time on her husband’s choices and foibles.

In one of his final vignettes, Sanford evokes the Statue of Liberty, standing somewhat forlornly in New York harbor. The “lamp beside the Golden Door,” symbol of welcome to immigrants, has gone out, and the Hudson River, stretching northward, is polluted. How, he wonders, could this happen in Paradise? “Johnny,” comments Maggie, “it always happens in Paradise.”

Has Sanford finally abandoned hope? I am reminded of an incident in “The View from Mt. Morris,” when young John’s grandfather tells his socialist Uncle Dave, “You’ve got to stop being a dreamer.” Dave never stopped dreaming of a better world, and neither, I suspect, has John Sanford.