Whittaker Chambers - A Biography

Informationen zum Autor Sam Tanenhaus was the editor of both  The New York Times Book Review  and the Week in Review section of The New York Times.  From 1999 to 2004 he was a contributing editor at  Vanity Fair , where he wrote often on politics. His work has also appeared in  The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books,  and many other publications. Tanenhaus’s book  Whittaker Chambers: A Biography  won the  Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Klappentext Whittaker Chambers is the first biography of this complex and enigmatic figure. Drawing on dozens of interviews and on materials from forty archives in the United States and abroad--including still-classified KGB dossiers--Tanenhaus traces the remarkable journey that led Chambers from a sleepy Long Island village to center stage in America's greatest political trial and then! in his last years! to a unique role as the godfather of post-war conservatism. This biography is rich in startling new information about Chambers's days as New York's "hottest literary Bolshevik"; his years as a Communist agent and then defector! hunted by the KGB; his conversion to Quakerism; his secret sexual turmoil; his turbulent decade at Time magazine! where he rose from the obscurity of the book-review page to transform the magazine into an oracle of apocalyptic anti-Communism. But all this was a prelude to the memorable events that began in August 1948! when Chambers testified against Alger Hiss in the spy case that changed America. Whittaker Chambers goes far beyond all previous accounts of the Hiss case! re-creating its improbably twists and turns! and disentangling the motives that propelled a vivid cast of characters in unpredictable directions. A rare conjunction of exacting scholarship and narrative art! Whittaker Chambers is a vivid tapestry of 20th century history. 1      Vivian   Jay Vivian Chambers was born on April 1, 1901—April Fool’s Day, as he liked to point out. He was named for his father, Jay Chambers, a graphic artist at the New York World. The boy’s middle name, chosen by his mother, Laha, dismayed her husband and also its bearer, called Vivian all through childhood. Jay, however, refused to utter the hated syllables and so inflicted on his son the nickname Beadle, evidently a comment on his demeanor, watchful, grave, and severe.   In 1903, after a second son, Richard, was born, Laha decided the young family should move from their apartment, near Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and resettle in the suburbs. She loathed New York City and missed the open spaces she had known in her own childhood, spent in Wisconsin.   Jay resisted the move. A city boy from Philadelphia, he enjoyed Brooklyn, its brownstones and tree-lined pavements. He liked too the easy access, by elevated subway, to his Manhattan office and the theaters and galleries he frequented. Also, he had recently lost his job at the World to a news camera, and although he soon found new employment—with a design studio on Union Square that did book covers and magazine illustrations—the venture was in its infancy and its prospects uncertain.   But Laha, insistent and strong-willed, prevailed over Jay, who was passive and retiring, and in 1904 the family moved to Lynbrook, a pretty coastal village on Long Island’s South Shore, twenty miles east of Manhattan, with a population of less than two thousand. The year the Chamberses moved there, Lynbrook got its first water mains and its first brick building, M. L. Levinson’s Hardware Store.   The family took up residence on Earle Avenue, an unpaved street lined with silver maples.4 The house, formerly a postal coach stop, was a sturdy clapboard structure, two stories plus a slope-ceilinged attic. It sat back from the street on a swatch of lawn. Though in need of repair,...

Product details

• Authors: Sam Tanenhaus
• Publisher: Modern Library PRH US
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 28.04.1998
• EAN: 9780375751455
• ISBN: 978-0-375-75145-5
• Series: Modern Library Paperbacks; Modern Library Paperbacks; Random House Publishing Group
• Subject: Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies