A controversial best-seller in 1977, The Public Burning has since emerged as one of the most influential novels of our time. The first major work of contemporary fiction ever to use historical figures as characters, the novel reimagines the three fateful days in 1953 that culminated with the execution of alleged atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Vice-President Richard Nixon – the voraciously ambitious bad boy of the Eisenhower regime – is the dominant narrator in an enormous cast that includes Betty Crocker, Joe McCarthy, the Marx Brothers, Walter Winchell, Uncle Sam, his adversary The Phantom, and Time magazine incarnated as the National Poet Laureate. All of these and thousands more converge in Times Square for the carnivalesque auto-da-f? at which the Rosenbergs are put to death. And not a person present escapes implication in Cold War America’s ruthless “public burning.”
Author: Robert Coover
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 04/02/1998
Series: Coover, Robert
Pages: 562
Weight: 1.35lbs
Size: 9.09h x 5.99w x 1.54d
ISBN: 9780802135278
Language: English
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