Code Name Puritan

Greg Barnhisel

ISBN 10: 022664720X / ISBN 13: 9780226647203

Published by The University of Chicago Press, US, 2024

About this Item

An insightful biography of an unassuming literary scholar-and spy-who transformed postwar American culture. Although his impact on twentieth-century American cultural life was profound, few people know the story of Norman Holmes Pearson. Pearson's life embodied the Cold War alliances among US artists, scholars, and the national-security state that coalesced after World War II. As a Yale professor and editor, he helped legitimize the study of American culture and shaped the public's understanding of literary modernism-significantly, the work of women poets such as Hilda Doolittle and Gertrude Stein. At the same time, as a spy, recruiter, and cultural diplomat, he connected the academy, the State Department, and even the CIA. In Code Name Puritan, Greg Barnhisel maps Pearson's life, from his childhood injury that led to a visible, permanent disability to his wartime counterespionage work neutralizing the Nazis' spy network to his powerful role in the cultural and political heyday sometimes called the American Century. Written with clarity and informed by meticulous research, Barnhisel's revelatory portrait of Pearson details how his unique experiences shaped his beliefs about the American character, from the Puritans onward.

Seller Inventory # LU-9780226647203

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Code Name Puritan
• Publisher: The University of Chicago Press, US
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022664720X
• ISBN 13: 9780226647203
• Binding: Hardback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 653 grams

About this title

Synopsis

An insightful biography of an unassuming literary scholar—and spy—who transformed postwar American culture.

Although his impact on twentieth-century American cultural life was profound, few people know the story of Norman Holmes Pearson. Pearson’s life embodied the Cold War alliances among US artists, scholars, and the national-security state that coalesced after World War II. As a Yale professor and editor, he helped legitimize the study of American culture and shaped the public’s understanding of literary modernism—significantly, the work of women poets such as Hilda Doolittle and Gertrude Stein. At the same time, as a spy, recruiter, and cultural diplomat, he connected the academy, the State Department, and even the CIA.

In Code Name Puritan, Greg Barnhisel maps Pearson’s life, from his childhood injury that led to a visible, permanent disability to his wartime counterespionage work neutralizing the Nazis’ spy network to his powerful role in the cultural and political heyday sometimes called the American Century. Written with clarity and informed by meticulous research, Barnhisel’s revelatory portrait of Pearson details how his unique experiences shaped his beliefs about the American character, from the Puritans onward.
 

 

About the Author

Greg Barnhisel is professor of English at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy and James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound, as well as editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook to Cold War Literary Cultures, Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War, and the scholarly journal Book History.