Finks

How the C.I.A. Tricked the World's Best Writers

Joel Whitney (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

352 Seiten

2018
Or Books (Verlag)
978-1-944869-52-6 (ISBN)

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The struggle against communism became the all-consuming passion of a small group of American men whose actions still reverberate today, and in many ways, mirror the Soviet ideology they despised. This is the story of one part of the very real "culture wars" waged by the CIA and its surrogates.

When news broke that the CIA had colluded with literary magazines to produce cultural propaganda throughout the Cold War, a debate began that has never been resolved. The story continues to unfold, with the reputations of some of America’s best-loved literary figures—including Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton, and Richard Wright—tarnished as their work for the intelligence agency has come to light.

Finks is a tale of two CIAs, and how they blurred the line between propaganda and literature. One CIA created literary magazines that promoted American and European writers and cultural freedom, while the other toppled governments, using assassination and censorship as political tools. Defenders of the "cultural" CIA argue that it should have been lauded for boosting interest in the arts and freedom of thought, but the two CIAs had the same undercover goals, and shared many of the same methods: deception, subterfuge and intimidation.

Finks demonstrates how the good-versus-bad CIA is a false divide, and that the cultural Cold Warriors again and again used anti-Communism as a lever to spy relentlessly on leftists, and indeed writers of all political inclinations, and thereby pushed U.S. democracy a little closer to the Soviet model of the surveillance state.

JOEL WHITNEY's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Baffler, New York Magazine, and The Sun, among others. His essays have twice been designated as Notable in Best American Essays, and he received a 2017 PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing for his work on Guernica, which he co-founded. For his poetry, which has appeared in The Paris Review, The Nation, and Agni, he is a recipient of the Discovery Prize awarded by the 92nd Street Y and The Nation. He lives in Brooklyn, where he is at work on a novel.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION: A Lit'r'y Coup

1 Graduates

2 The Responsibility of Editors

3 Pasternak, the CIA, and Feltrinelli

4 The Paris Review Goes to Moscow

5 Did the CIA Censor Its Magazines?

6 James Baldwin's Protest

7 Into India

8 The US Coup in Guatemala

9 Cuba: A Portrait by Figueres, Plimpton, Hemingway, Garcia Marquez, Part 1

10 Cuba: A Portrait by Plimpton, Hemingway and Garcia Marquez, Part 2

11 Tools Rush In: Pablo Neruda, Mundo Nuevo and Keith Botsford

12 The Vital Center Cannot Hold

13 Blowback

CODA Afghanistan

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

SOURCES

ENDNOTES

INDEX

Erscheinungsdatum	06.02.2018
Zusatzinfo	Illustrations
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	139 x 209 mm
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik ► Allgemeines / Lexika
	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Staat / Verwaltung
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	1-944869-52-2 / 1944869522
ISBN-13	978-1-944869-52-6 / 9781944869526
Zustand	Neuware