Whittaker Chambers was an American writer and intelligence agent. After early years as a Communist Party member (1925) and Soviet spy (1932–1938), he defected from the Soviet underground in 1938. He then worked for Time magazine (1939–1948) before his testimony about the Ware Group and the participation of Alger Hiss saw Chambers sued for libel in 1948 in a case referred to as "the trial of the century", all described in his 1952 memoir Witness. Afterwards, he worked as a senior editor at National Review (1957–1959). US President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1984.
Judith Coplon Socolov was a spy for the Soviet Union whose trials, convictions, and successful constitutional appeals had a profound influence on espionage prosecutions during the Cold War.
Boris Yakovlevich Bukov, also Boris Bykov ("Sasha") Regiment Commissar was a member of the Communist Party since 1919. Bykov was head of the underground apparatus with which Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss were connected.
Yuval Levin is an Israeli-born American conservative political analyst, academic, and journalist. He is the founding editor of National Affairs (2009–present), the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (2019–present), and a contributing editor of National Review (2007–present) and co-founder and a senior editor of The New Atlantis (2003–present).
Richard Edward Lauterbach was the Time magazine Moscow bureau chief during World War II.
The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality is a book written by Austrian School economist and libertarian thinker Ludwig von Mises. It is an investigation into the psychological roots of the anti-capitalistic stance that Mises saw as widespread in the general populations of the capitalist world. Mises suggests various reasons for this mentality, primarily his claim that free competition in the market economy allows for no excuses of one's failures.
Herbert Solow was an American journalist and co-editor of the Menorah Journal who was first a Communist fellow-traveler in the 1920s, a Trotskyist in the 1930s, and then abandoned leftist politics to work in Henry Luce's publishing empire as Fortune editor.
Stacy Madeleine Schiff is an American essayist. Her biography of Véra Nabokov won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in biography. Schiff has also written biographies of French aviator and author of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, colonial American-era polymath and prime mover of America's founding, Benjamin Franklin, Franklin's fellow Founding Father Samuel Adams, ancient Egyptian queen Cleopatra, and the important figures and events of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692–93 in colonial Massachusetts.
Louis Kronenberger was an American literary critic, novelist, and biographer who wrote extensively on drama and the 18th century.
Jonathan Yardley is an American author and former book critic at The Washington Post from 1981 to December 2014, and held the same post from 1978 to 1981 at the Washington Star. In 1981, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
Wilder Hobson was an American writer and editor for Time (1930s-1940s), Fortune (1940s), Harper's Bazaar (1950s), and Newsweek (1960s) magazines. He was also a competent musician (trombone), author of an history of American jazz, and long-time contributor to Saturday Review magazine. Also, he served on the planning committee of the Institute of Jazz Studies.
Jacob Burck was a Polish-born Jewish-American painter, sculptor, and award-winning editorial cartoonist. Active in the Communist movement from 1926 as a political cartoonist and muralist, Burck quit the Communist Party after a visit to the Soviet Union in 1936, deeply offended by political demands there to manipulate his work.
Benjamin W. Huebsch was an American publisher in New York City in the early 20th century.
Lorraine Adams is an American journalist and novelist. As a journalist, she is known as a contributor to the New York Times Book Review, and a former contributor to The Washington Post. As a novelist, she is known for the award-winning Harbor and its follow-up, The Room and the Chair.
Thomas Stanley Matthews was an American magazine editor, journalist, and writer. He served as editor of Time magazine from 1949 to 1953.
Calvin Fixx, born Calvin Henry Fix, was an American journalist and editor, lifelong friend of Robert Cantwell and friend of Whittaker Chambers, both fellow editors at Time magazine. All three were either Marxist or communist during the 1920s and 1930s but had become anti-communists by 1939.
John Barkham was a South African-born American syndicated writer for Time, New York Times Book Review, New York World-Telegram, and New York Post who published several thousand book reviews in over half a century of work.
Henry Saul Zolinsky (1901–2001) was an American Objectivist poet and friend of Whittaker Chambers, Meyer Schapiro, Louis Zukofsky, and Samuel Roth.
Witness, first published in May 1952, is a best-selling book of memoirs by American writer Whittaker Chambers (1901–1961), which recounts his life as a dedicated Marxist-communist ideologist in the 1920s, his work in the Soviet underground during the 1930s, and his 1948 testimony before the US Congress, which led to a criminal indictment against Alger Hiss and two trials in 1949.
