The years between the end of World War 2 and the beginning of the Nineties were characterized by a deeply polarized world. Capitalist and communist countries were in direct opposition to one another and this tension was the inspiration for many books. With so many to choose from, though, it's not always easy to find a good Cold War author but your task will be much easier if you could narrow the writers down by genre.
The Cold War wasn't really an armed conflict in the tradition of wars everywhere. Instead, it was a power struggle between the capitalist and communist countries. This tension was the underlying reason for foreign intervention in places like Korea, Vietnam and the revolutionary wars in Africa and Latin America but there was never a full-scale war specifically between the superpowers, the USA and the USSR.
One of the ways in which the superpowers fought one another was through espionage, trying to get the upper hand by knowing what the other side was planning. Espionage goes hand in hand with drama, intrigue, action, adventure and in some cases, even romance and these themes make for thrilling reading. That's why the spy thriller flourished during this era.
John Le Carre is one of the leading writers of the spy thriller. His most famous book is probably 'The Spy Who Came In from the Cold' but he also wrote 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy', 'The Constant Gardener' and 'The Russia House', all of which became successful movies too. Le Carre had the advantage that he used to be a spy himself, just like Graham Greene, another master of the genre. Many writers of spy thrillers also used to be journalists, like Frederick Forsythe.
Sometimes a character would come back in spy story after spy story. Several of these characters even made it into cinema history. For instance, Harrison Ford brought Jack Ryan, the secret agent created by Tom Clancy, to life in several films, as did Matt Damon with Jason Bourne, created by Robert Ludlum. Ian Fleming created the ultimate spy hero, a character that almost every male actor would love to play at least once: agent 007, James Bond.
It's not only the USA and UK that produced great storytellers during the Cold War era. From behind the Iron Curtain came the voices of writers like the Czechs Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel, the latter later president of his country. However, many of these writers' works were suppressed if they were critical of their country's political system and Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of the Soviet Union and Reinaldo Arenas from Cuba were just two of the authors who were subjected to imprisonment and eventually were expelled from their countries.
Not everything written about the era is fiction. You'll find a huge variety of non-fiction works on the political situation at the time, explaining events like John F Kennedy's assassination, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the intriguing lives of the role-players involved. The stories of everyday people are told too, for instance in Anna Funder's moving 'Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall'.
A good way to find your ideal Cold War author is to search online and then read the reviews of different people's works. You can also ask in your local bookstore or library. Then all you need is a quiet spot and some time to curl up with a great story.
The Cold War wasn't really an armed conflict in the tradition of wars everywhere. Instead, it was a power struggle between the capitalist and communist countries. This tension was the underlying reason for foreign intervention in places like Korea, Vietnam and the revolutionary wars in Africa and Latin America but there was never a full-scale war specifically between the superpowers, the USA and the USSR.
One of the ways in which the superpowers fought one another was through espionage, trying to get the upper hand by knowing what the other side was planning. Espionage goes hand in hand with drama, intrigue, action, adventure and in some cases, even romance and these themes make for thrilling reading. That's why the spy thriller flourished during this era.
John Le Carre is one of the leading writers of the spy thriller. His most famous book is probably 'The Spy Who Came In from the Cold' but he also wrote 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy', 'The Constant Gardener' and 'The Russia House', all of which became successful movies too. Le Carre had the advantage that he used to be a spy himself, just like Graham Greene, another master of the genre. Many writers of spy thrillers also used to be journalists, like Frederick Forsythe.
Sometimes a character would come back in spy story after spy story. Several of these characters even made it into cinema history. For instance, Harrison Ford brought Jack Ryan, the secret agent created by Tom Clancy, to life in several films, as did Matt Damon with Jason Bourne, created by Robert Ludlum. Ian Fleming created the ultimate spy hero, a character that almost every male actor would love to play at least once: agent 007, James Bond.
It's not only the USA and UK that produced great storytellers during the Cold War era. From behind the Iron Curtain came the voices of writers like the Czechs Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel, the latter later president of his country. However, many of these writers' works were suppressed if they were critical of their country's political system and Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of the Soviet Union and Reinaldo Arenas from Cuba were just two of the authors who were subjected to imprisonment and eventually were expelled from their countries.
Not everything written about the era is fiction. You'll find a huge variety of non-fiction works on the political situation at the time, explaining events like John F Kennedy's assassination, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the intriguing lives of the role-players involved. The stories of everyday people are told too, for instance in Anna Funder's moving 'Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall'.
A good way to find your ideal Cold War author is to search online and then read the reviews of different people's works. You can also ask in your local bookstore or library. Then all you need is a quiet spot and some time to curl up with a great story.
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