Description
Book SynopsisOn a sweltering June evening in 1937, American Juliet Stuart Poyntz left her boardinghouse in Manhattan and walked toward Central Park, three short blocks away. She was never seen or heard from again. Seven months passed before a formal missing person's report was made, since Poyntz worked for the Soviet Secret Police and her friends (many of whom were anti-Stalinist radicals in the United States) were scared to alert authorities. Her disappearance coincided with Josef Stalin's purges of his political enemies in the Soviet Union and it was feared that Poyntz was a casualty of Soviet brutality.
In Where Is Juliet Stuart Poyntz?, Denise M. Lynn argues that Poyntz's sudden disappearance was the final straw for many on the American political left, who then abandoned Marxism and began to embrace anti-communism. In the years to follow, the left crafted narratives of her disappearance that became central to the Cold War. While scholars have thoroughly analyzed the influence of the political right in the anti-communism of this era, this captivating and compelling study is unique in exploring the influence of the political left.
Trade ReviewLynn’s scholarship is exhaustive. Even though I am familiar with the case and the characters, I found myself being drawn into the writing and turning the pages eager to learn some new detail or twist." —Vernon L. Pedersen, president of the Historians of American Communism and author of
The Communist Party in Maryland, 1919–57"In the first full examination of this significant case in the annals of American communism and anti-communism, Lynn has constructed a tight story of one of the central precipitating narratives of the domestic Cold War that reads like a gripping spy thriller." —John Sbardellati, author of
J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood’s Cold War
