Awards

• Winner of Pamela Jensen Book Award 2024 (United States)

Overview

How risky encounters between American and Czech writers behind the Iron Curtain shaped the art and politics of the Cold War and helped define an era of dissent. ""In some indescribable way, we are each other's continuation,"" Arthur Miller wrote of the imprisoned Czech playwright Václav Havel. After a Soviet-led invasion ended the Prague Spring, many US-based writers experienced a similar shock of solidarity. Brian Goodman examines the surprising and consequential connections between American and Czech literary cultures during the Cold War-connections that influenced art and politics on both sides of the Iron Curtain. American writers had long been attracted to Prague, a city they associated with the spectral figure of Franz Kafka. Goodman reconstructs the Czech journeys of Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, and John Updike, as well as their friendships with nonconformists like Havel, Josef Škvorecký, Ivan Klíma, and Milan Kundera. Czechoslovakia, meanwhile, was home to a literary counterculture shaped by years of engagement with American sources, from Moby-Dick and the Beats to Dixieland jazz and rock 'n' roll. Czechs eagerly followed cultural trends in the United States, creatively appropriating works by authors like Langston Hughes and Ernest Hemingway, sometimes at considerable risk to themselves. The Nonconformists tells the story of a group of writers who crossed boundaries of language and politics, rearranging them in the process. The transnational circulation of literature played an important role in the formation of new subcultures and reading publics, reshaping political imaginations and transforming the city of Kafka into a global capital of dissent. From the postwar dream of a ""Czechoslovak road to socialism"" to the neoconservative embrace of Eastern bloc dissidence on the eve of the Velvet Revolution, history was changed by a collision of literary cultures.

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Reviews

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: Art and Thought in the Cold War

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 <i>The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War</i>

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 <i>The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War</i> 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 <i>Kafka Translated: How Translators Have Shaped Our Reading of Kafka</i> 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 <i>The Novel of Human Rights</i>

Author Information

Brian K. Goodman specializes in American studies, literature and human rights, and dissident cultures and has written for the Los Angeles Review of Books and Public Books. He is Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State University, where he is a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Jewish Studies and the Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies.

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