Events & Programs

Professor Emeritus John V. Fleming presents his book The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books that Shaped the Cold War.

The books altered the course of history; the lives behind them have the dark fascination of fiction. The subject of The Anti-Communist Manifestos is four influential books that informed the great political struggle known as the Cold War: Darkness at Noon (1940), by Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian journalist and polymath intellectual; Out of the Night (1941), by Jan Valtin, a German sailor and labor agitator; I Chose Freedom (1946), by Victor Kravchenko, a Soviet engineer; and Witness (1952), by Whittaker Chambers, an American journalist. The authors were ex-Communist Party members whose bitter disillusionment led them to turn on their former allegiance in literary fury. John V. Fleming's humane and ironic narrative of these grim lives reveals that words were the true driving force behind the Cold War.

About John V. Fleming

John V. Fleming graduated from the University of the South (Sewanee) in 1958. He then went for three years as a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford, where he took a honours BA in English. He next spent two years at Princeton getting a Ph.D. (1963), before becoming an Instructor in English at the University of Wisconsin. He returned to Princeton in 1965, where he taught until his retirement in 2006.