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When the CIA turned writers into operatives
A new show about the Cold War, “Not All Propaganda Is Art,” reveals the dark, sometimes comic ironies of trying to control the world through culture.
It’s a zesty beginning, meant to draw us into the heart of Walker’s project: a group biography, as he calls it, of the writers Dwight Macdonald, Kenneth Tynan, and Richard Wright, whose trajectories help to illuminate the shadowy maneuverings of the cultural Cold War between 1956 and 1960. Tynan, another contributor to Encounter, calls British culture a moribund “dust bowl,” and publishes his famously impassioned review of the play “ Look Back in Anger,” which helps to kick off the class-conscious Angry Young Man movement in Britain. Macdonald, Tynan, and Wright all produce excellent work during these years, reckoning with big questions about art, criticism, society, and economic systems, even as they’re being paid by front organizations for a propaganda scheme.
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