Harry Gold
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Harry Gold: A Novel |
|---|---|
| Author: | Millicent Dillon |
| Honors: | |
| Genres: | |
| Publisher: | Penguin USA |
This is the story about a spy. And a spy, by definition, lies. So how to write the life of a spy? Eschewing the confines of traditional biography and inverting the glamour of espionage, acclaimed biographer Millicent Dillon blends fact and fiction to chronicle the human drama of Harry Gold, the American chemist who becomes a Soviet spy.
Dillon has researched Gold’s outer life thoroughly, as a biographer would. She has then limned his inner life to create a profound and compelling character study of a self-described “little man” who personifies the larger symbolism of this complex era in American history.
In casting Gold’s story as a novel, Dillon creates a gripping narrative from the true events of political life in America from the 30s through the McCarthy era, from Gold’s recruitment to his training in tradecraft to his role in Julius Rosenberg’s and Klaus Fuchs’s atomic espionage at Los Alamos. The result is a novel with the psychological depth of Graham Greene’s The Third Man, the taut pacing of All the President’s Men, and moral poignancy of Phillip Roth’s I Married A Communist.
| Find it: | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| |||
