Drawing on newly declassified files, this is the story of how a book forbidden in the Soviet Union became a secret CIA weapon in the ideological battle between East and West. In May 1956, an Italian publishing scout paid a visit to Russia's greatest living poet, Boris Pasternak. He left carrying the manuscript of Pasternak's first and only novel, entrusted to him with these words: "This is Doctor Zhivago. May it make its way around the world." Pasternak...

This series of essays is concerned with authors who stand at “the bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet.” Why “bloody”? Because writers' blood has often been shed when they boldly expressed their opinions, and some of their opinions have influenced political leaders to shed the blood of others. In his analysis of contemporary writers such as Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, and Camus, Podhoretz examines the literary and cultural sweep...

Recounts the fifty year espionage campaign waged by intelligence agencies against famed American writers.

This volume offers an account of political change since 1945 and how such change shaped the cultural output of our time. It also looks at how and when literature intersects with other cultural forms - including jazz and rock music, television, journalism, commercial and mass cultures - and the growth of American cultural dominance.

This book examines the story of the coalition of poets, editors, and politicians who, after the Cold War, attempted to discredit--if not destroy--the American modernist avant-garde. Ideologically diverse, yet willing to bespeak their hatred of modern poetry through the rhetoric of anticommunism, these "anticommunist antimodernists," joined associations such as the League for Sanity in Poetry to decry the modernist "conspiracy" against form and language....

In this path-breaking study, Michael Bennett departs from tradition to argue that the democratic ideal of equality and the actual ways in which it has been practiced are grounded less in the fledgling government documents written by a handful of white men than in the actions and writings of the radical abolitionists of the nineteenth century. Bringing together key texts of both African American and European American authors, Democratic Discourses...