McCarthyism Stars

Fiction

• Kill Me Again: Scott Elliott
  Author: Faherty, Terence
  Publisher: $ ISBN: 0684826887 Date: 1996
  The Edgar-nominated mystery writer sets his new series in glamorous postwar Hollywood. Returning hero Scott Elliott reaches Tinseltown only to find there's no place for him in front of the cameras, and that out beyond the spotlight, beyond the glitz and glamour, there's nothing but jealousy, despair--and murder.
  Updated 6.6.05
• Cheat and Charmer
  Author: Frank, Elizabeth
  Publisher: Random $ 25.95 ISBN: 1400060915 Date: 2004
  Kirkus LJ
  Twenty-five years in the making, a first novel that has already been compared to The Sun Also Rises and The Last Tycoon, Cheat and Charmer is certain to be one of the most admired literary debuts of the season. Written by Pulitzer Prize--winning biographer Elizabeth Frank, Cheat and Charmer is a masterful and richly detailed work of fiction-a Tolstoyan novel of marriage, sisterhood, art, politics, compromise, and betrayal set in Hollywood, New York, Paris, and London of the 1950s. - Publisher Marketing.
  Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction
  Updated 9.20.04
• Wavemaker 2
  Author: Hughes, Mary-Beth
  Publisher: Atlantic $ 24 ISBN: 0871138352 Date: 2002
  Booklist Library Journal
  An exhilarating debut, Wavemaker II is a heart-stopping story of what happens when one man takes a fall for another, leaving his family in disarray. Combining poetic intensity with a gritty realism, Mary-Beth Hughes has delivered a masterpiece of page-turning suspense.
  Suggested Reading: Debuts
  Updated 1/29/02
• An Unfinished Season
  Author: Just, Ward S.
  Publisher: Houghton Mifflin $ 24 ISBN: 0618036695 Date: 2004
  Kirkus PW Booklist
  The distinguished chronicler of American social history and political culture hauntingly captures the 1950s, a time when even the small-town family could not escape the nationwide suspicion and dread of "the enemy within."
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
  Updated 6.1.04
• Red Death
  Author: Mosley, Walter
  Publisher: Norton $ 19.95 ISBN: 0393029980 Date: 1991
  Kirkus
  Walter Mosley's debut novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, introduced readers to Easy Rawlins. Now an independent operative in Watts, Easy's caught in a crunch between a vengeful IRS agent in search of his cash and an obsessed FBI man in search of Reds (Communist sympathizers). The action is swift in this novel described by the Los Angeles Times as "Astonishing . . ".
  Updated 6.6.05
• You Must Remember This
  Author: Oates, Joyce Carol
  Publisher: Dutton $ 19.95 ISBN: 0525245456 Date: 1987
  An epic novel of an American family in the 1950s proves the tender division between what is permissible and what is taboo, between ordinary life and the secret places of the heart.
  Updated 6.6.05
• Blacklist: V.I. Warshawski
  Author: Paretsky, Sara
  Publisher: Putnam $ 24.95 ISBN: 0399150854 Date: 2003
  Booklist LJ
  Paretsky returns with her heroine V.I. Warshawski--"a private eye with the sharpest tongue and hardest head in Chicago" (The New York Times). This is a story of secrets and betrayals that stretch across four generations--secrets political, social, sexual, financial: all of them with the power to kill.
  Suggested Reading: Private Investigators
  Updated 9.08.03
• I Married a Communist
  Author: Roth, Philip
  Publisher: Houghton Mifflin List Price: $ 26 ISBN: 0395933463 Date: 1998
  Booklist
  Iron Rinn, born Ira Ringold, is an idealistic American Communist, a self-educated ditchdigger turned popular performer, married to the nation's reigning radio actress. Fierce and funny, eloquently rendered and politically accurate, the story of Rinn's denunciation and disgrace during the time of McCarthy's "witch hunts" brings to harrowing life the human drama that was central to the nation's betrayal, blacklisting, and naming names.
  Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
• Shimmer
  Author: Schulman, Sarah
  Publisher: Bard List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0380976463 Date: 1998
  LJ
  A brilliantly rendered, wonderfully evocative novel of three ambitious people in post-World War II New York City, by the author of Rat Bohemia, Empathy, People in Trouble, and After Delores.
  Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars
• The Golden Age
  Author: Vidal, Gore
  Publisher: Doubleday $ 27.50 ISBN: 0385500750 Date: 2000
  Kirkus
  The concluding volume in Gore Vidal's celebrated and bestselling series of American Chronicle novels -- a unique pageant of the American experience from just before our entry in World War II to the end of the Korean War. - from the Advance Reading Copy.
  Suggested Reading: World Wars Stars
  Updated 7/21/00

Nonfiction

• The Red and the Blacklist
  Author: Barzman, Norma
  Publisher: Thunder's Mouth $ 24.95 ISBN: 1560254661 Date: 2003
  PW
  Norma Barzman book is a memoir of the struggle against McCarthyism in Hollywood in the 1940s and Paris in the 50s and 60s.
  Updated 2.10.03
• Un-American Activities: A Memoir of the Fifties
  Author: Belfrage, Sally
  Publisher: HarperCollins $ 22.50 ISBN: 0060190000 Date: 1994
  PW
  A funny, affecting memoir of an atypical American girl--a daughter of radicals who desperately wants to blend in during the '50s, America's premier decade of conformity. Pinned to a West Point cadet, Sally's dreams of becoming a military wife were ultimately shattered, while her father was jailed and her mother deported.
  Updated 6.6.05
• Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition: An Oral History
  Author: Fariello, Griffin
  Publisher: Norton $ 29.95 ISBN: 0393037320 Date: 1995
  PW
  For many years, the true story of the Red Scare that began in the '40s with Joe McCarthy and Hoover's G-Men has been lost in the dustbin of history. Now, Arthur Miller, Alger Hiss, Linus Pauling and nearly 70 others reveal the terrible price extracted by that era. Their stories capture firsthand the sorrow, the rage, and the heroism of America's darkest hour.
  Updated 6.6.05
• Being Red
  Author: Fast, Howard
  Publisher: Houghton $ 22.95 ISBN: 0395551307 Date: 1990
  Kirkus
  Being Red is an intimate memoir of an extraordinary time--the years Howard Fast, one of our nation's most popular authors, spent in the American Communist Party, and under the constant surveillance of the FBI.
  Updated 6.6.05
• The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism
  Author: Johnson, Haynes
  Publisher: Harcourt $ 26 ISBN: 0151010625 Date: 2005
  PW
  Compelling narrative history, insightful political commentary, and intimate personal remembrance combine to make The Age of Anxiety a vitally important look at Senator Joseph McCarthy and his 1950s anti-Communist crusade.
  Suggested Reading: Terrorism
  Updated 7.25.05
• Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs Helen Gahagen Douglas - Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950
  Author: Mitchell, Greg
  Publisher: Random $ 25 ISBN: 0679416218 Date: 1998
  LJ
  Drawing on recently discovered unpublished documents from Nixon's 1950 campaign for the Senate, this rousing narrative--featuring such luminaries as Earl Warren, Cecil B. DeMille, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan--exposes the Red-baiting strategy used against Nixon's opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas, and shows what it was like to be a female politician long before the "Year of the Woman".
  Updated 6.6.05
• I'd Hate Myself in the Morning: A Memoir
  Author: Lardner, Ring
  Publisher: Thunders Mouth $ 22.95 ISBN: 1560252960 Date: 2000
  Booklist
  This memoir of a reporter-turned-screenwriter follows Lardner's experiences through the Hollywood contract system of the 1940s and 1950s and its demise. It also tells how Lardner's membership with the Hollywood branch of the American Communist Party garnered him a federal-prison sentence and a place on the Hollywood blacklist.
  Updated 6.6.05
• Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America
  Author: Schrecker, Ellen
  Publisher: Little Brown $ 29.95 ISBN: 0316774707 Date: 1998
  Kirkus
  From an award-winning McCarthy scholar comes the first post-Cold War exploration of the anticommunist witch-hunt and its devastating impact. Tracing the way that a network of dedicated anticommunists created blacklists and destroyed organizations, this broadbased inquiry reveals the connections between McCarthyism's disparate elements in the belief that understanding its terrible mechanics can prevent a repetition.
  Updated 6.6.05