Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War

During the Cold War both the United States and the Soviet Union believed that literature had a meaningful influence on its readers, making it an ideal tool for propaganda. As such, controlling literary output became a priority for both countries and a means to amplify support and silence dissent. White (Assistant Director of Studies in History & Literature, Harvard Univ.; Vladimir Nabokov) chronicles the resources and methods used by both nations and the effects they had on writers and the books they wrote. From the Spanish Civil War to the war in Vietnam, White covers several decades and focuses on more than a dozen authors. As is the risk with any book trying to cover so much, Cold Warriors as a whole is uneven. It is at its strongest when charting the shifting communist sympathies of George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Mary McCarthy, and others, but what connects all the authors mentioned is primarily that they were writing during the Cold War. Alone that is not enough to satisfyingly carry the narrative.