Unfortunately, this event has been postponed. We hope to reschedule it soon.

There was no more potent weapon in the Cold War than the printed book. Drawing from his recently published book, Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War, Duncan White explains how literature was weaponized as part of the ideological conflict on both sides of the Iron Curtain, showing how writers like Graham Greene, Mary McCarthy, John Le Carré, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn were drawn into the war as spies, propagandists and dissidents. 

Duncan White is Associate Director of Studies in History & Literature at Harvard University. He received his D.Phil from the University of Oxford and is the author of Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War, a Sunday Times 2019 Book of the Year, and Nabokov and His Books, published by Oxford University Press in 2017. He writes about books for the Daily Telegraph, and has also contributed to the the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is sponsored jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest and the George Washington University History Department for their support.