Foreign Rights

In these times of crisis, one should read and re-read this account of America during the Great Depression. This key book, “unpityingly critical and deeply tender” (Jorge Semprun), has left itsmark since it came out in 1938. In the style of literature unique to him, part reporting and part novel form, Pozner observes and describes a country, the United States, which, though in full spiritual and material distress, does not cease to fascinate. The author probes the soul of this people through a powerful montage of snapshots: daily life in Harlem, Pinkerton strike-breakers, the war of newspapers in Chicago, the fallen heros of Hollywood, the violent strikes in Pennsylvania’s mines, John Dos Passos and Waldo Frank, the “Dear Abby” columns and the ghost writers, the shoelace merchant of Wall Street, the gangsters and the undertakers. It creates a mosaic reflecting the image of a country where energy contends with despair, solidarity with poverty; and where the cult of service and efficiency leads, in most cases, to subservience and brainwashing.

As a novelist in Paris, a Revolution-era poet in Russia, a screenwriter in Hollywood and a reporter all over the world, Vladimir Pozner experienced the twentieth century to the fullest. He knew many of the writers, filmmakers, painters, musicians, scientists, and actors who instilled the world with much of the era’s zeitgeist. And yet he never wrote about himself, or about his relationships with the famous and the infamous. Then one day he began to write a book about some of his friends who played pivotal roles in his life. Readers will already be familiar with most of them, and will discover others of the same ilk. With his customary unobtrusiveness and the magic of his words, Pozner brings them to life beneath our eyes. In doing so, he creates a portrait of himself unlike any other.