Edgar Snow: A Biography

About this book

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.