Table of Contents

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

About the Author

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.

Reviews

"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 reckoning—one that compels all those who work in the academic, media and literary boiler rooms to ask some troubling questions of themselves—namely, 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 tentacles—from 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 costs—political and artistic—of accommodating power." —Ben Wizner, Director of Speech, Privacy and Technology Project