Cold Warriors

Cold Warriors traces the literary front of the Cold War through the intertwined lives of writers including George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, Mary McCarthy, Boris Pasternak, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, alongside the intelligence agencies that quietly shaped what got published, translated, and smuggled across the Iron Curtain. Duncan White reveals how the CIA secretly funded literary magazines and even airdropped copies of Animal Farm behind Soviet lines, often without the authors' knowledge.

Spanning from the Spanish Civil War to the Soviet Union's collapse, the book uses biography to illuminate how deeply fiction and poetry became entangled with espionage, propaganda, and superpower rivalry.