Edgar Snow ― A Biography

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 believed to be no more than a ragtag bandit army. Snow took them seriously as a national movement. His reporting in the now-famous Red Star over China was major news, even to the Chinese, thousands of whom joined the Communists after reading the book. It has remained a seminal reference on the early Chinese Communist movement.
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. Hamilton also covers Snow's reporting of other episodes in his wide-ranging journalistic career, including peasant rebellions in Vietnam and Burma and the bloody western front in World War II. 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 committee reporting that is crucial to understanding our interdependent world.

John Maxwell Hamilton is author or coauthor of five books, most recently Casanova Was a Book Lover: And Other Naked Truths and Provocative Curiosities about the Writing, Selling, and Reading of Books. He is dean and Hopkins P. Breazeale Foundation Professor of Journalism at Louisiana State University and a longtime commentator on Public Radio International's Marketplace.