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Fine unread condition brown boards, black spine, and gold spine lettering contained in a fine condition photographic dust jacket. Includes List of Other Book(s) by Sam Tanenhaus; Author Dedication; Preliminary Page Quote by W.H. Auden; Appendix: Sifting the Evidence; Notes; Select Bibliography; Acknowledgments; Index and About the Author. Illustrated with black-and-white photographs. "Nearly half a century after giving the testimony that sent Alger Hiss to prison, Whittaker Chambers remains among the most controversial of twentieth-century Americans, hated by many, revered by others. Whittaker Chambers is the first biography of this complex and enigmatic figure. Drawing on dozens of interviews and on materials from forty archives in the United States and abroad - including still-classified KGB Dossiers - Sam Tanenhaus traces the remarkable journey that led Chambers from a sleepy Long Island village to center stage in America's greatest political trial and then, in his last years, to a unique role as the godfather of postwar conservatism. Whittaker Chambers is rich in startling new information about every phase of its subject's varied life: his days as New York's "hottest literary Bolshevik"; his years as a Communist agent and then defector, hunted by the KGB; his conversion to Quakerism; his secret sexual turmoil; his turbulent decade at Time, where he rose from the obscurity of the book-review page to transform the magazine into an oracle of apocalyptic anti-Communism. But all this was merely a prelude to the memorable events that began in August 1948, when Chambers was summoned by a coungressional committee to testify about his past as a Communist agent. Reluctantly, he divulged his key part in a spy ring that had penetrated the most sensitive areas of the U.S. government, including the State Department, where one of his accomplices, Alger Hiss, had risen to a senior position. Chambers' allegations, and Hiss's prompt, emphatic denial, held the nation spellbound - and initiated a drama that changed the face of America. Drawing on an array of new sources, including transcripts of secret HUAC testimony, Whittaker Chambers goes far beyond all previous accounts of the Hiss case, re-creating its improbable twists and turns, and disentangling the motives that propelled a vivid cast of characters in unpredictable directions, Tanenhaus sheds new light on such high points of the case as the "pumpkin papers" Chambers hid on his Maryland farm; the sudden, shocking death of diplomat Laurence Duggan; the backstage intrigue of novice "spy prober" Richard Nixon, whose handling of the investigation catapulted him to the White House. And always, in the eye of the storm, stands Chambers, inscrutable and fatalistic, loathing his role as informer but enacting his part with consummate theatricality. Reborn as a hero to the Right, Chambers became mentor to a new conservative movement led by the young William F. Buckley, Jr., and then joined one last fight, struggling to curb the excesses of the anti-Communist hysteria he had helped unleash. Through it all, Chambers continued to fascinate his contemporaries, who never stopped quarreling about him. To some he was a fascist, to some a martyr, to most a mystery. With the publication of Whittaker Chambers, the mystery ends. This biography gives us the real Chambers, a unique blend of romantic poet, religious pilgrim, and political revolutionary, utterly serious in all he undertook, determined to find a sustaining faith in a world where belief no longer seemed possible - "the most misunderstood person of our time," in the words of Arthur Koestler. A rare conjunction of exacting scholarship and narrative art, Whittaker Chambers is the definitive portrait of a figure whose impact on "the American century" is still being felt to this day." - excerpt from the inner front and rear jacket flaps.
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