Telling America's Story to the World: Literature, Internationalism, Cultural Diplomacy

Writing in 1954 to accept an invitation to teach in Austria as part of the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, Ralph Ellison shared his plan to tailor his lectures to his students: “I shall adapt my lectures to the backgrounds of the students as I come to know them, and that the problem of their possible attitudes toward America in no way bothers me. I feel neither the necessity to attack nor defend. I am interested only in helping them to discover the complex truth of American reality” (quoted on p. 75).¹

That pedagogical project—to discover the complex truth of American reality—could serve as a fair description of what Ellison was up to in his novel of two years prior, Invisible Man. In Telling America's Story to the World: Literature, Internationalism, Cultural Diplomacy, Harilaos Stecopoulos tells us the story of what happened when writers such as Ellison were sent abroad by federal agencies during and after the Cold War for the purposes of displaying the fruits of American culture and of demonstrating US interest in cross-cultural exchange. In Stecopoulos's telling, Ellison responded to his time in Salzburg, in the shadow of an Army base (and a work by fellow teacher Robert Lowell that was itself a response to Lowell's time there), by thinking further about not only the complex truth he'd written and taught about but about the truth of Uncle Sam's role abroad, a poem in one hand and a rifle in the other, and about the connections between the violent mistreatment of Black Americans at home and the dangerous behavior of America in the rest of the world. For Ellison, the efforts he was part of didn't succeed in promoting international connection and cooperation but instead ended up “revealing the incoherence of Americanness itself” (55).

At a time when the strength of the state, historical forces, and the movements of power are sometimes seen as too great for art to resist, Telling America's Story to the World reminds us that in spite of its best, even occasionally well-intentioned efforts, works of literature can't entirely be corralled for other ends. Stecopoulos's book does so by telling its own story about the cultural Cold War and beyond, moments in US history from the 1940s to the 1980s when the state enlisted writers in its efforts to promote an image of itself as playing a benevolent role on the global stage, and by showing that if you examine those works you can see that those efforts probably did more for the writers than they did for the state. This is an important story to tell because in Stecopoulos's hands it teaches us not only about these efforts but also about the unintended effects of these efforts on these writers and their work. Telling America's Story to the World shows the United States attempting to internationalize itself and instead internationalizing its writers, a development that took their work in unanticipated directions. In doing so, the book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of postwar America and the writing that grew out of and beyond those circumstances.

In writing the story of US intentions in sending abroad writers like Ellison, Lowell, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, and Maxine Hong Kingston, Stecopoulos expands our understanding of the cultural Cold War. In his telling, these writers were sent by the various federal agencies involved not simply to show off—to demonstrate the high cultural achievements of the nation—but to send a message: that the United States wanted to connect with the world culturally. Unlike propaganda issued by the government praising the American Way of Life at the height of the Cold War, these liberal internationalist efforts were more concerned with demonstrating good will beyond the taking of sides that was the Cold War. (Stecopoulos is also committed to expanding our view of cultural diplomacy as something that continues after the hottest years of the Cold War and beyond it, even into the twenty-first century.) These efforts also demonstrated a faith in the universality of literary works, especially modernist ones, a faith that benefited the professoriate in literature and American studies departments as well as the writers whose work was championed and disseminated (a benefit that did not go unquestioned, as Stecopoulos relates in a note about Allen Ginsberg's 1975 poem “T. S. Eliot Entered My Dreams” (225–26n21), one of many footnotes in this book that evoke that reliable indicator of a book that's got a rich story to tell: in reading it, you often wish the stories in the footnotes were in the main text).

This narrative has been established by scholars working in this well-trod field such as Frances Stonor Saunders, Jason Epstein, and Christopher Lasch; what Stecopoulos's book brings to it is a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between the state and the writers, one that allows for the possibility that writers can get out from under the state's influence and write what they think about what they see. Getting deep into the archives—writers’ correspondence, agency records—to redefine cultural diplomacy beyond what it calls CIA Modernism (in a play on Cold War Modernism) and to see alternative internationalisms developing in the work of the writer-ambassadors on whom it focuses, Telling America's Story to the World places writers where they should be in literary history: the center. They are not alone, maybe in a garret, cold, exploring their genius, and they are not playthings of historical forces they can neither comprehend nor resist; instead, they are out exploring the world, knee-deep in historical context and aware of it, thinking about how things are and how they should be. And they were not just given new experiences and new platforms; they were building bridges, establishing personal and institutional connections that changed what they wrote and what we read.

Inadvertently given the opportunity to think about “how they might signify in an international register” (xi), these writers told the wrong stories—not positive, exceptionalist stories about America's benevolent place in the world, but stories that considered the damage it had done and was doing to the world—and reflected on the social meaning and power of literature more broadly. This argument moves us beyond the story of writers tricked into thinking they were just doing outreach; instead, in this account, they knowingly seize the opportunity to be critical of US foreign policy and to think about “the relationship of literature to internationalism” (xii), and they even use cultural diplomacy as its own technology of transmission, to borrow Stecopoulos's term (40).

Each chapter focuses on one or two writers who participated in US cultural diplomacy at different historical moments and in different settings, offering richly researched accounts of their participation and close readings of works argued to be significantly shaped by their experiences. Stecopoulos begins with Archibald MacLeish's time building early 1940s efforts at international outreach and reads his essays and a radio play about early American contact narratives in the light of the violence of MacLeish's time. Next he turns to Lowell and Ellison and their shared but also very different ways of drawing connections between American violence at home and abroad in response to their time at Salzburg. Stecopoulos's third chapter is fascinating, examining Faulkner's participation in Eisenhower's People-to-People Program (PTP) and reading the final two Snopes novels, The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959), as influenced by hopefulness about the potential of the middlebrow internationalism that characterized the program. Turning from Faulkner to Hughes and from PTP to outreach to newly independent African nations, the antepenultimate chapter reads Hughes's poem “Cultural Exchange” (1961) for what it says about Black diaspora; the chapter also examines the benefits of “diasporic diplomacy” (117) on the place in the American canon of Black American literature. The next chapter looks at the work American writers did in Eastern Bloc countries in the 1960s and subsequent decades through the experience of Arthur Miller as president of PEN International; reading Miller's nonfiction book In Russia (1969) and his 1977 play The Archbishop's Ceiling, Stecopoulos sees in this work, literary and otherwise, attention not only to oppressed Eastern writers but to “a crisis in American literary culture” (152) in which Western writers whose work was felt to be of less importance than the work of their Eastern counterparts and the work of their compatriots in a past in which literature mattered more. Finally, Stecopoulos turns to the 1980s US-China writers’ conferences and the involvement of Maxine Hong Kingston, whom he sees as having seized the opportunity to examine, in Tripmaster Monkey: His Fakebook (1989), not simply international relations but hybrid Americanness itself.

There are things I wish had been included in this book, including books that couldn't have been because time is not a flat circle (Brian Goodman's excellent The Nonconformists: American and Czech Writers across the Iron Curtain [2023], which bears Stecopoulos's influence) and related books that might be too far off-topic (Eric Bennett's 2015 Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War, which, full disclosure, appeared in a series I edit). More importantly, I just wish there were more of it, not because there should have been but because there could have been: it tells such a rich and significant story that there could be many more chapters in it about the historical moments it covers and after (and Stecopoulos's coda gestures toward all that could follow) and about the larger questions about art and society that it raises. With any luck, other scholars will pick up the trail and continue the story, and will continue the attention paid to writers’ syllabi and lecture notes, as Stecopoulos does here and as Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan do more extensively in 2020’s The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study. In following these trails, they might continue to produce scholarship that demonstrates the value of doing work in literary history that centers writers, features sensitive close readings informed by deeply researched historical contexts, and keeps its boots on the ground where the individual actors and institutions who make history stand (including their classrooms, at home and abroad) rather than dwelling entirely with the historical forces and movements of power to which we might sometimes give too much credit.

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