If you loved Kate Moore's The Radium Girls or Sonia Purnell's A Woman of No Importance, you'll be enthralled with this untold story of how Katharine Clark, a trailblazing journalist, exposed the truth about Communism to the world.
Meticulously researched and written by Clark's great-niece, Katharine Gregorio, The Double Life of Katharine Clark is historical narrative nonfiction at its finest. It is a fascinating Cold War adventure story about a remarkable woman who pioneered a career in a man's profession, vividly illuminating a largely untold chapter of the twentieth century.
In 1955, Katharine Clark became the first female American wire reporter behind the Iron Curtain, providing essential eyewitness reports of post-war Europe and the revolutions in Poland and Hungary to the American public. It was while on assignment in Belgrade, Yugoslavia that she befriended Milovan Djilas, a high-ranking Communist leader and intellectual, who became disillusioned with Communism and published a number of newspaper articles criticizing the practices of the regime. He was stripped of his duties and arrested before being released under the watchful eye of the Yugoslavian secret police.
Clark risked her life to ensure Djilas's articles made it to the West, and she was single-handedly responsible for smuggling his scathing anti-Communism manifesto, The New Class, out of Yugoslavia and into the hands of American publishers. The New Class would go on to sell three million copies worldwide, become a New York Times bestseller, translated into over 60 languages, and be used by the CIA in its covert book program.
The Double Life of Katharine Clark shows how a strong-willed, fiercely independent woman with an ardent commitment to truth, justice, and freedom put her life on the line to share ideas with the world, ultimately reshaping both herself—and history—in the process.