Edgar Snow: A Biography

By John Maxwell Hamilton and Hopkins P Breazeale Professor of Journalism John Maxwell Hamilton

Book Overview

Edgar Snow (1905--1972) was one of the most notable Western journalists to report on China in both the revolutionary and postrevolutionary periods. He first became famous in the mid-1930s when he broke through a Nationalist blockade and reached the Communists in northwest China. For nearly a decade, no foreign reporter had seen the Communists, who were widely regarded as a ragtag bandit army. Snow took them seriously as a national movement. His reporting in the now-famous book Red Star over China was major news, even to the Chinese, thousands of whom joined the Communists after reading it. It has remained a seminal reference on the early Chinese Communist movement. In this award-winning biography, journalist John Maxwell Hamilton follows Snow from his birth in Kansas City to his rise as a celebrated foreign correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post, his ostracism during the cold war, and his role as a singular journalistic bridge between Communist China and the United States. With a new preface by the author, this revealing portrait of the widely misunderstood Snow firmly establishes him as a model for the kind of committed reporting that is crucial to understanding our interdependent world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807129127
• ISBN13: 9780807129128
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Length: 343 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.9" x 9.3"