A fellow traveler (US English) or fellow traveller (Commonwealth English) is a person who sympathizes with the beliefs of an organization or cooperates in its activities without maintaining formal membership in that particular group. In the early Soviet Union the approximate term was used without negative connotation to describe writers and artists sympathetic to the goals of the Russian Revolution who declined to join the Communist Party. The English-language phrase came into vogue in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s as a pejorative term for a sympathizer of Communism or particular Communist states, who was nonetheless not a "card-carrying member" of a Communist party.
Famous quotes containing the words fellow traveler, fellow and/or traveler:
“The literary “fellow travelers” of the Revolution.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)
“Jealousy is the theory that some other fellow has just as little taste.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“There the traveler meets, aghast,
Sheeted memories of the past—
Shrouded forms that start and sigh
As they pass the wanderer by—
White-robed forms of friends long given,
In agony, to the earth—and heaven.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)