Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War

Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War

Cover Art for 9780062449818, Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War by Duncan White
ISBN: 9780062449818
Publisher: Custom House
Published: 19 February, 2019
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Links Harper Collins
Editions:
11 other editions of this product

A brilliant, invigorating account of the great writers on both sides of the Iron Curtain who played the dangerous games of espionage, dissidence and subversion that changed the course of the Cold War. During the Cold War, literature was both sword and noose. Novels, essays and poems could win the hearts and minds of those caught between the competing creeds of capitalism and communism. They could also lead to exile, imprisonment or execution if they offended those in power. The clandestine intelligence services of the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union had secret agents and vast propaganda networks devoted to literary warfare. But the battles were personal, too: friends turning on each other, lovers cleaved by political fissures, artists undermined by inadvertent complicities. In Cold Warriors, Harvard University's Duncan White vividly chronicles how this ferocious intellectual struggle was waged on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The book has at its heart five major writers--George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene and Andrei Sinyavsky--but the full cast includes a dazzling array of giants, among them Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, John le Carré, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Boris Pasternak, Gioconda Belli, Arthur Koestler, Vaclav Havel, Joan Didion, Isaac Babel, Howard Fast, Lillian Hellman, Mikhail Sholokhov --and scores more. Spanning decades and continents and spectacularly meshing gripping narrative with perceptive literary detective work, Cold Warriors is a welcome reminder that, at a moment when ignorance is celebrated and reading seen as increasingly irrelevant, writers and books can change the world. Cold Warriors includes 20-30 black-and-white photographs.

Booko is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more

Shop Preferences

Customize which shops to display. You can include the following shops by logging in to change your settings.

Booko is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more

Historical Prices

Loading...
This graph is for informational purposes only. Occasionally pricing data is captured incorrectly, through bugs in Booko or the stores supplying data, which may distort the graph, providing undue hope that even lower prices sometimes appear.

Recently Updated