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, García
Márquez, part 1
10: Cuba: A Portrait by Plimpton, Hemingway, and García Márquez,
part 2
11: Tools Rush In: Pablo Neruda, Mundo Nuevo, and Keith
Botsford
12: The Vital Center Cannot Hold
13: Blowback
Coda: Afghanistan
Endnotes
Sources
Index
Joel Whitney is a cofounder and editor at large of Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, Boston Review, The San Francisco Chronicle, Dissent, Salon, NPR, New York Magazine and The Sun. With photographer Brett Van Ort, he co-wrote the 2013 TED Talks ebook on landmine eradication, Minescape. His poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, The Nation, and Agni. His Salon essay on The Paris Review and the Congress for Cultural Freedom was a Notable in the 2013 Best American Essays.
"Another odd episode steps out from the Cold War's shadows.
Riveting." Kirkus, Starred Review
"Listen to this book, because it talks in a very clear way about
what has been silenced."John Berger, author of Ways of Seeing and
winner of the Man Booker Prize
"It may be difficult today to believe that the American
intellectual elite was once deeply embedded with the CIA. But with
Finks, Joel Whitney vividly brings to life the early days of the
Cold War, when the CIA's Ivy League ties were strong, and key
American literary figures were willing to secretly do the bidding
of the nation's spymasters." James Risen, author of Pay Any Price:
Greed, Power and Endless War
A deep look at that scoundrel time when America's most
sophisticated and enlightened literati eagerly collaborated with
our growing national security state. Finks is a timely moral
reckoningone that compels all those who work in the academic,
media and literary boiler rooms to ask some troubling questions of
themselvesnamely, what, if anything, have they done to resist the
subversion of free thought?” David Talbot, founder of Salon and
author of The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the
Rise of America's Secret Government
"At the height of the cold war, the CIA set out to influence
Americans by infiltrating our country’s literary and artistic
establishment. Finks is a devastating work of investigative history
that unearths the shocking reach of the Agency’s tentaclesfrom
Baldwin and Hemingway to The Paris Review and the renowned American
Studies department at Yale. Today, when cultural and literary icons
seem closer than ever to elite interests, Finks is a timely
reckoning of how we got here. You will never look at American
literary culture the same way again." Anand Gopal, Pulitzer- and
National Book Award-nominated author of No Good Men Among the
Living
"The CIA's covert financial support of highbrow art and fiction may
seem like a quaint, even endearing, chapter in its otherwise grim
history of coups, assassinations, and torture. In Finks, Joel
Whitney argues otherwise and shines a discomfiting spotlight on
this obscure corner of the cultural Cold War. The result is both an
illuminating read and a cautionary tale about the potential
costspolitical and artisticof accommodating power." Ben Wizner,
Director of Speech, Privacy and Technology Project
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