The years between the end of World War 2 and the beginning of the Nineties were characterized by a deeply polarized world. Capitalist and communist countries were in direct opposition to one another and this tension was the inspiration for many books. With so many to choose from, though, it's not always easy to find a good Cold War author but your task will be much easier if you could narrow the writers down by genre.
The Cold War was not a war in the true sense of the word. While the two opposing sides often got involved in armed conflicts in other parts of the world, from Korea and Vietnam to the liberation wars of Africa, they never directly fired shots on each other's soil. Of course the main deterrent was fear of causing another world war but this fear also kept the tension between capitalism and communism alive for almost half a decade.
One of the ways in which the superpowers fought one another was through espionage, trying to get the upper hand by knowing what the other side was planning. Espionage goes hand in hand with drama, intrigue, action, adventure and in some cases, even romance and these themes make for thrilling reading. That's why the spy thriller flourished during this era.
John Le Carre is one of the leading writers of the spy thriller. His most famous book is probably 'The Spy Who Came In from the Cold' but he also wrote 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy', 'The Constant Gardener' and 'The Russia House', all of which became successful movies too. Le Carre had the advantage that he used to be a spy himself, just like Graham Greene, another master of the genre. Many writers of spy thrillers also used to be journalists, like Frederick Forsythe.
Sometimes a character would come back in spy story after spy story. Several of these characters even made it into cinema history. For instance, Harrison Ford brought Jack Ryan, the secret agent created by Tom Clancy, to life in several films, as did Matt Damon with Jason Bourne, created by Robert Ludlum. Ian Fleming created the ultimate spy hero, a character that almost every male actor would love to play at least once: agent 007, James Bond.
It's not only the USA and UK that produced great storytellers during the Cold War era. From behind the Iron Curtain came the voices of writers like the Czechs Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel, the latter later president of his country. However, many of these writers' works were suppressed if they were critical of their country's political system and Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of the Soviet Union and Reinaldo Arenas from Cuba were just two of the authors who were subjected to imprisonment and eventually were expelled from their countries.
Non-fiction books on the topic abound too. There are some that deal with the entire era while others focus on specific events or people. For example, you'll find several books on the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy assassination or on figures like Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara. Some of the non-fiction books deal with the stories of regular, everyday people. Australian author Anna Funder, for instance, recorded the stories of East Germans in 'Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall'.
It's easy to find books on the era that defined the second half of the 1900s. A simple online search will point you in the right direction but you can also ask at any library or bookstore. Once you've found a Cold War author whose work you like, you'll be hooked.
The Cold War was not a war in the true sense of the word. While the two opposing sides often got involved in armed conflicts in other parts of the world, from Korea and Vietnam to the liberation wars of Africa, they never directly fired shots on each other's soil. Of course the main deterrent was fear of causing another world war but this fear also kept the tension between capitalism and communism alive for almost half a decade.
One of the ways in which the superpowers fought one another was through espionage, trying to get the upper hand by knowing what the other side was planning. Espionage goes hand in hand with drama, intrigue, action, adventure and in some cases, even romance and these themes make for thrilling reading. That's why the spy thriller flourished during this era.
John Le Carre is one of the leading writers of the spy thriller. His most famous book is probably 'The Spy Who Came In from the Cold' but he also wrote 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy', 'The Constant Gardener' and 'The Russia House', all of which became successful movies too. Le Carre had the advantage that he used to be a spy himself, just like Graham Greene, another master of the genre. Many writers of spy thrillers also used to be journalists, like Frederick Forsythe.
Sometimes a character would come back in spy story after spy story. Several of these characters even made it into cinema history. For instance, Harrison Ford brought Jack Ryan, the secret agent created by Tom Clancy, to life in several films, as did Matt Damon with Jason Bourne, created by Robert Ludlum. Ian Fleming created the ultimate spy hero, a character that almost every male actor would love to play at least once: agent 007, James Bond.
It's not only the USA and UK that produced great storytellers during the Cold War era. From behind the Iron Curtain came the voices of writers like the Czechs Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel, the latter later president of his country. However, many of these writers' works were suppressed if they were critical of their country's political system and Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of the Soviet Union and Reinaldo Arenas from Cuba were just two of the authors who were subjected to imprisonment and eventually were expelled from their countries.
Non-fiction books on the topic abound too. There are some that deal with the entire era while others focus on specific events or people. For example, you'll find several books on the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy assassination or on figures like Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara. Some of the non-fiction books deal with the stories of regular, everyday people. Australian author Anna Funder, for instance, recorded the stories of East Germans in 'Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall'.
It's easy to find books on the era that defined the second half of the 1900s. A simple online search will point you in the right direction but you can also ask at any library or bookstore. Once you've found a Cold War author whose work you like, you'll be hooked.
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