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How the C.I.A. Tricked the World's Best Writers
by Joel Whitney
Finks demonstrates how the good-versus-bad CIA is a false divide, and that the cultural Cold Warriors again and again used anti-Communism as a lever to spy relentlessly on leftists, and indeed writers of all political inclinations, and thereby pushed U.S. democracy a little closer to the Soviet model of the surveillance state.
When news broke that the CIA had colluded with literary magazines to produce cultural propaganda throughout the Cold War, a debate began that has never been resolved. The story continues to unfold, with the reputations of some of America's best-loved literary figures - including Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton, and Richard Wright - tarnished as their work for the intelligence agency has come to light.
Finks is a tale of two CIAs, and how they blurred the line between propaganda and literature. One CIA created literary magazines that promoted American and European writers and cultural freedom, while the other toppled governments, using assassination and censorship as political tools. Defenders of the "cultural" CIA argue that it should have been lauded for boosting interest in the arts and freedom of thought, but the two CIAs had the same undercover goals, and shared many of the same methods: deception, subterfuge and intimidation.
"Starred Review. Another odd episode steps out from the Cold War's shadows. Riveting." - Kirkus
"Listen to this book, because it talks in a very clear way about what has been silenced."- John Berger, author of Ways of Seeing and winner of the Man Booker Prize
"Joel Whitney vividly brings to life the early days of the Cold War, when the CIA's Ivy League ties were strong, and key American literary figures were willing to secretly do the bidding of the nation's spymasters." - James Risen, author of Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War
"A deep look at that scoundrel time when America's most sophisticated and enlightened literati eagerly collaborated with our growing national security state. Finks is a timely moral reckoning - one that compels all those who work in the academic, media and literary boiler rooms to ask some troubling questions of themselves - namely, what, if anything, have they done to resist the subversion of free thought?" - David Talbot, founder of Salon and author of The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America's Secret Government
"The marriage of politics and literature is always messy and seldom boring. Intrusive governments are invariably unimaginative and plotting writers are hilariously ineffective. The whole thing makes for tortured drama, and Joel Whitney is a savvy dramatist who knows perfectly how to juice intrigue!" - Ilan Stavans, author of Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years
"The CIA's covert financial support of highbrow art and fiction may seem like a quaint, even endearing, chapter in its otherwise grim history of coups, assassinations, and torture... an illuminating read and a cautionary tale about the potential costs - political and artistic - of accommodating power." - Ben Wizner, Director of Speech, Privacy and Technology Project
This information about Finks was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Joel Whitney is the author of Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers, which The New Republic called a "powerful warning." His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Baffler, The Wall Street Journal, Boston Review, New York Magazine, and elsewhere. He is a former features editor at Al Jazeera America and a founder and former editor-in-chief of Guernica: A Global Magazine of Art & Politics, for which he was awarded the 2017 PEN/Nora Magid Award for Excellence in Editing. His essays in The Baffler, Dissent and Salon were Notables in Best American Essays 2017, 2015 and 2013.
A graduate of Columbia University's School of the Arts, Joel's poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, The Nation, and Agni, and was awarded the Discovery Prize from the 92nd Street Y and The Nation. Joel curates literary programs at Brooklyn Public Library's BPL Presents. In 2022, he co-edited Lenapehoking, an anthology of historical essays, interviews and poetry, co-published by Ugly Duckling Presse, Lenape Center & Brooklyn Public Library.
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