A treacherous secret agent : how literature spoke truth to power during the Red Scare / Marjorie Garber.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Garber, Marjorie B., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

United States. Congress. House. Committee on Un-American Activities.

United States.

Politics and literature--United States--History--20th century.

Politics and literature.

Communism and literature--United States--History--20th century.

Communism and literature.

Communism and art--United States--History--20th century.

Communism and art.

Revenge in literature.

Communism and art--History.

Communism and literature--History.

Revenge in art.

Physical Description:

viii, 245 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 23 cm

Other Title:

How literature spoke truth to power during the Red Scare

Place of Publication:

New Haven : Yale University Press, [2026]

Summary:

"A world-renowned critic's haunting and deeply researched account of the subversive acts of literary revenge performed during the Red Scare hearings of the 1950s. In the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations led by Senator Joseph McCarthy targeted actors, directors, singers, filmmakers, writers, and prominent scientists, accusing them of disloyalty, subversion, and treason against the United States of America. HUAC and McCarthyism ruined careers and lives. But something striking also happened during the hearings: the poems, plays, novels, and song lyrics cited in the witness testimony spoke back, offering uncanny counter-testimonies and remarkable acts of "poetic revenge." This book is an urgent, probing exploration of the HUAC, its attempts to bowdlerize and contort facts, and the voices that rose out of history to oppose and subsume it. Marjorie Garber shows how writers versed in the literary tropes of revenge appear in the hearings: William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, John Donne, George Herbert, Francis Bellamy, and others. But the agent of revenge is not the author of the work; it is the work itself, with all its cultural power and relevance, spanning years or centuries. In narrating the destructive history of the Red Scare, Garber powerfully illuminates the constructive force of literature in opposing political oppression."-Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: Poetic revenge

Marlowe's tradecraft: Hallie Flanagan and the Dies Committee

Tales of a fabulist: Louis Budenz on Aesopian language

"Not in our stars": Ed Murrow saw it then

J. Robert Oppenheimer: the metaphysical physicist

One nation divisible: scanning the Pledge of Allegiance

Singing to the Committee: the folk wisdom of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie

Paul Robeson: the HUAC Othello

Red Scare Shakespeare: Papp and Pappaganda in Central Park

Coda: What comes around.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

ebook version :

ISBN:

9780300282825

0300282826

OCLC:

1524233245

Publisher Number:

CIPO000359275