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.
In an atmosphere of mistrust, you have the perfect breeding ground for spies. The Cold War soon became the golden era of the spy novel, especially in the USA and Britain. Few themes can inspire stories of intrigue, drama, adventure and action quite like espionage does.
The king of the spy thriller is John Le Carre, who penned such classics as 'The Spy Who Came In from the Cold', 'The Russia House' and 'The Constant Gardener'. Like another popular writer in the genre, Graham Greene, Le Carre used to work for his country's secret service and had first-hand knowledge of the world of espionage. Journalists like Frederick Forsythe also made good authors of spy thrillers.
Many authors of spy thrillers created characters that returned in novel after novel. Some of these characters became household names because of their portrayal in movies. Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan and Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne are just two examples. The one that has become everyone's favorite, however, is Ian Fleming's suave British agent known as Bond, 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.
In an atmosphere of mistrust, you have the perfect breeding ground for spies. The Cold War soon became the golden era of the spy novel, especially in the USA and Britain. Few themes can inspire stories of intrigue, drama, adventure and action quite like espionage does.
The king of the spy thriller is John Le Carre, who penned such classics as 'The Spy Who Came In from the Cold', 'The Russia House' and 'The Constant Gardener'. Like another popular writer in the genre, Graham Greene, Le Carre used to work for his country's secret service and had first-hand knowledge of the world of espionage. Journalists like Frederick Forsythe also made good authors of spy thrillers.
Many authors of spy thrillers created characters that returned in novel after novel. Some of these characters became household names because of their portrayal in movies. Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan and Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne are just two examples. The one that has become everyone's favorite, however, is Ian Fleming's suave British agent known as Bond, 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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