The Nonconformists: American and Czech Writers across the Iron Curtain

The Cold War was an era of surprising connections between American and Czech literary cultures. Major writers met behind the Iron Curtain, while others smuggled, translated, and adapted works from the other side. Brian K. Goodman explores the artistic and political consequences, arguing that the movement of literature inspired new forms of dissent.

Table of Contents:
Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Prologue Introduction Chapter 1. The Man Who Disappeared Chapter 2. Behind the Gold Curtain Chapter 3. The Cowards’ Guide to World Literature Chapter 4. The Kingdom of May Chapter 5. The Tourist Chapter 6. Across the Gray Zone Epilogue Abbreviations Notes Acknowledgments Index

Review :
A stimulating book...brilliantly shows that while American literature and music offered Czechs a dream of improvisatory freedom, Czech literature offered Americans an example of what, variously, they might do with it as if it mattered. -- Kathryn Murphy Times Literary Supplement An excellent contribution to the field...an extremely stimulating work full of rewarding details. -- Martin Machovec Austrian History Yearbook Focusing on how literature and politics between American and Czech writers intertwined, Goodman lays out the surprising extent and frequency in which the writers from the two countries influenced each other. As a result, the transnational scope of the work as well as the aim to refocus our discussion of the cultural Cold War toward the Eastern Bloc makes [this book] a valuable addition to both Czech and American literary scholarship. -- Anton�n Zita CEU Review of Books Goodman brilliantly reveals how US-Czech literary encounters produced, largely unintentionally, the figure of the 'dissident writer, ' which eventually became the symbol of the human rights movement that brought down the Iron Curtain. He reminds us that the Cold War was a period of lively, if often tortured, cultural exchange that cannot be reduced to the terms of a Cold War binary. -- Louis Menand, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Free World Eye-opening and unforgettable. Goodman is a wonderful storyteller, and this is a story never told before. Featuring a vibrant continuum of literature, music, and theater linking Czechoslovakia and the United States, this East-West fusion sheds light on Franz Kafka, V�clav Havel, and Josef Skvoreck� no less than Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, and Arthur Miller. -- Wai Chee Dimock, author of Weak Planet Illuminating and full of insights. With lucid and often elegant prose, Goodman masterfully tackles the continuities between American and Czech literary cultures during the Cold War era. Among its many virtues, The Nonconformists moves us away from a US-centric literary history and toward one that attends carefully to the cross-cultural networks that extended across the Iron Curtain. -- James Dawes, author of The Novel of Human Rights Beautifully written and imaginatively conceived, The Nonconformists brilliantly captures the ambiguities of moral witness in the era of Cold War literary dissent. Goodman takes us on a grand literary tour showing how the transnational encounters between such towering figures as Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, V�clav Havel, and Milan Kundera were foundational for the emergence of a new global human rights order in the late twentieth century. -- Mark Bradley, author of The World Reimagined Groundbreaking and highly original. Goodman's meticulous archival research and his capacious familiarity with the latest research in Czech and American studies is impressive. Even more so is his ability to stitch together what might initially seem to be adjacent case studies into a deep fabric of transnational intellectual history. -- Michelle Woods, author of Kafka Translated