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Biography of New York's "hottest
Modern Library
April 1998
656 pages
ISBN: 0375751459
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
Whittaker Chambers is the first biography of this
complex and enigmatic figure. Drawing on dozens of
interviews and on materials from forty archives in the
United States and abroad--including still-classified KGB
dossiers--Tanenhaus traces the remarkable journey that led
Chambers from a sleepy Long Island village to center stage
in America's greatest political trial and then, in his last
years, to a unique role as the godfather of post-war
conservatism. This biography is rich in startling new
information about Chambers's days as New York's "hottest
literary Bolshevik"; his years as a Communist agent and then
defector, hunted by the KGB; his conversion to Quakerism;
his secret sexual turmoil; his turbulent decade at Time
magazine, where he rose from the obscurity of the
book-review page to transform the magazine into an oracle of
apocalyptic anti-Communism. But all this was a prelude to
the memorable events that began in August 1948, when
Chambers testified against Alger Hiss in the spy case that
changed America. Whittaker Chambers goes far beyond
all previous accounts of the Hiss case, re-creating its
improbably twists and turns, and disentangling the motives
that propelled a vivid cast of characters in unpredictable
directions.
A rare conjunction of exacting
scholarship and narrative art, Whittaker Chambers is
a vivid tapestry of 20th century history.
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