Examining the two-way transmission of dissident literature between the United States and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, Brian K. Goodman's The Nonconformists: American and Czech Writers across the Iron Curtain examines five writers who were remarkably able to move their ideas—and in some cases, themselves—over closed borders: Franz Kafka, F. O. Matthiessen, Josef Škvorecký, Allen Ginsberg, and Philip Roth, as well as others, like John Updike, who played important but less pivotal roles in transnational cultural communication during the Cold War.
A substantial body of scholarship has developed over the past several decades that reexamines Cold War literature within the framework of cultural warfare. But Goodman argues that “the rubric of the ‘cultural Cold War’ . . . treats literary culture as an ideological proxy for US-Soviet geopolitical rivalry rather than as an imaginative form of politics in its own right” (p. 18). In this regard, Goodman's focus is largely...