"In these writings, Hilton Kramer explores, in effect, the intellectual history of the cold war and its divisive impact on our politics and culture. His book is also necessarily about the consequences of the 1930s and the 1960s, two decades when the political left achieved its greatest influence. Tracing the critical debate over communism and modernism, he surveys the writers who moved in the forefront of that debate - Whittaker Chambers, Josephine Herbst, Lillian Hellman, Nora Sayre, Edmund Wilson, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Diana Trilling, Saul Bellow, Clement Greenberg, Lincoln Kirstein, Meyer Schapiro, Susan Sontag, Cyril Connolly, George Orwell, Kenneth Tynan, and others - and the issues that animated their controversies: the struggle over Stalinism, the triumph of the "new sensibility" over modernism, and what Mr. Kramer calls "the strange fate of liberal anti-communism.""--BOOK JACKET.
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