Title: Notes from the underground
First published: 1997
Description: For the first time: the only known contemporaneous written record of Whittaker Chambers's thoughts during the trial of Alger Hiss. In 1948, Chambers, a former Communist agent, and a Time magazine editor, fingered Hiss, a senior State Department official, as a Soviet spy - triggering the most famous espionage trial in American history.

Ralph de Toledano, the Newsweek reporter covering the Hiss trial (technically for perjury), quickly became close friends with Chambers. The two men began exchanging letters in 1949 and continued for the rest of Chambers's life.

Now, in Notes from the Underground: The Whittaker Chambers-Ralph de Toledano Letters, 1949-1960, these letters have been collected and made available for the first time. Chambers, best known for his moving personal memoir, Witness, is portrayed here as a man of deep philosophical and spiritual thought.

Included are Chambers's reflections on the state of American liberalism, his opinions of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, his words of personal anguish suffered after the close of the trial, and his thoughts on the fate of Western civilization.
Subjects: Correspondence, Sources, Politics and government, History, Journalists, Spies, Subversive activities, Anti-communist movements, Chambers, whittaker, 1901-1961, Hiss, alger, 1904-1996, Journalists, correspondence, United states, politics and government, 1945-1953, United states, politics and government, 1953-1961
Places: United States
People: Alger Hiss, Ralph de Toledano (1916-), Whittaker Chambers
Time periods: 20th century, 1945-1953, 1953-1961
LC classification: E743.5 .C45 1997