This article is a retrospective consideration of the late Frederik Pohl, and in particular the critical reception of his work and the relation of his science fiction to the 1950s. It offers a counter-reading of Pohl's importance, suggesting that the insistent masculinism of Pohl and the 'wiseacre' mid-century American male voice he adopts throughout his fiction, should be more profitably understood in terms of his political formation in the 1930. Through a reading of Michael Denning's The Cultural Front, the article proposes that Pohl's work, as well as that of his fellow Futurian writers, can be read as a form of proletarian literature.