Red Scare

The Early Cold War in Novels by Mailer, Doctorow, and Roth

Authors

  • Andrew Gordon University of Florida Author

Keywords:

Red Scare, Cold War fiction, anti-communism in literature, Barbary Shore, McCarthyism, political repression, paranoia and hysteria, American leftism

Abstract

This essay examines the beginnings of the Cold War as viewed in three American novels published in the second half of the twentieth century, between 1951 and 1998: Norman Mailer’s Barbary Shore (1951), E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel (1971), and Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist (1998). These three political novels by Jewish-American writers focus on the first decade of the Cold War, from 1946–54, when the few surviving remnants of the Old Left were crushed in the most severe political repression in American history, the period known as the Red Scare. The dominant emotions of the early Cold War, and of these novels, are hysteria and depression.

Author Biography

  • Andrew Gordon, University of Florida

    Andrew Gordon is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Florida. He received his PhD from Berkeley and has taught Contemporary American Fiction and Film, Jewish-American Fiction, and Science Fiction. He was a Fulbright Lecturer in Spain, Portugal, and Serbia, and he organizes the annual International Conference on Psychology and the Arts. His publications include An American Dreamer: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Fiction of Norman Mailer (1980), Psychoanalyses/Feminisms (2000; edited with Peter Rudnytsky), Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness (2003; with Hernán Vera), and Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg (2008).

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Published

2026-10-10

Issue

Vol. 8 No. 1 (2014): Future Bound

Section

Articles