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 Vaclav 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 Skvorecky, Ivan Klima, 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.

About the Author
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.

Reviews
A stimulating book...brilliantly shows that while American literature and music offered Czechs a dream of improvisatory freedom, Czech literature offered Americans an example of what, variously, they might do with it as if it mattered. -- Kathryn Murphy * Times Literary Supplement *
Painstakingly researched...reconstructs...writers' numerous trips to Prague during the mid-20th century, but also their gravitation towards members of the vanguard of anti-establishment culture in Czechoslovakia. -- Ian Ellison * Los Angeles Review of Books *
An excellent contribution to the field...an extremely stimulating work full of rewarding details. -- Martin Machovec * Austrian History Yearbook *
Focusing on how literature and politics between American and Czech writers intertwined, Goodman lays out the surprising extent and frequency in which the writers from the two countries influenced each other. As a result, the transnational scope of the work as well as the aim to refocus our discussion of the cultural Cold War toward the Eastern Bloc makes [this book] a valuable addition to both Czech and American literary scholarship. -- Antonin Zita * CEU Review of Books *
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
Eye-opening and unforgettable. Goodman is a wonderful storyteller, and this is a story never told before. Featuring a vibrant continuum of literature, music, and theater linking Czechoslovakia and the United States, this East-West fusion sheds light on Franz Kafka, Vaclav Havel, and Josef Skvorecky no less than Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, and Arthur Miller. -- Wai Chee Dimock, author of Weak Planet
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 The Novel of Human Rights
Beautifully written and imaginatively conceived, The Nonconformists brilliantly captures the ambiguities of moral witness in the era of Cold War literary dissent. Goodman takes us on a grand literary tour showing how the transnational encounters between such towering figures as Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, Vaclav Havel, and Milan Kundera were foundational for the emergence of a new global human rights order in the late twentieth century. -- Mark Bradley, author of The World Reimagined
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 Kafka Translated



Book Information
ISBN 9780674983373
Author Brian K. Goodman
Format Hardback
Page Count 368
Imprint Harvard University Press
Publisher Harvard University Press
Weight(grams) 726g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 156mm * 33mm