Through brilliant portraits of real persons who created the myths and realities of the 1930s, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Murray Kempton brings that turbulent decade to life. Himself a child of the time, Kempton examines with the insight and imagination of a novelist the men and women who embraced, grappled with, and in many cases were destroyed by the myth of revolution. What he calls the "ruins and monuments of the Thirties" include Paul Robeson,
Alger Hiss, and Whittaker Chambers, the
Hollywood Ten, the rebel women Elizabeth Bentley and Mary Heaton Vorse, and the labor leaders
Walter Reuther and Joe Curran
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Background Information
Alger Hiss worked in the state department and was accused of acting as a spy for the Soviet Union. During the McCarthy era, those in Hollywood who refused to cooperate with his committee were placed on a blacklist and found themselves unable to work in the movie industry.
