The Cold War was a military, economic, and intellectual struggle touching almost every aspect of public life in the West and the Soviet bloc. Art and culture were a crucial battlefield. A spate of recent studies of the “cultural Cold War” has looked in detail at how jazz concerts, dance performances, literary magazines, and writers’ conferences in the 1950s and 1960s were supercharged with Cold War tensions.
Even reading itself became freighted with Cold War meaning. “Books are weapons in the war of ideas,” an Office of War Information campaign had insisted in 1942, and this held true even after the defeat of the book-burning Nazis. A 1953 American publication, The Wonderful World of Books, insisted that “reading the right things” will show the world that “democracy can work and … spiritual integrity can pay.” On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the Soviet publishing industry distributed millions...