Author | Irwin Shaw |
---|---|
Language | English |
Set in | New York City |
Publisher | Random House |
Publication date | 1951 |
Publication place | United States |
Preceded by | The Young Lions |
Followed by | Lucy Crown |
The Troubled Air is a novel by Irwin Shaw first published in 1951. It is a story of the radio industry (at a time when shows were produced live) set in 1950, during the blacklisting of McCarthyism. [1]
The plot centers around Clement Archer, the director of a successful weekly radio program, who is told by the producers and sponsors to fire four actors and one musician working on the show because of alleged Communist sympathizing. To save the show, and because of his own conscience, Archer wins a two-week deferral and starts his own investigation. Eventually, one of the contributors commits suicide, two of the others betray Archer, and the careers of all others are ruined. Archer reconciles with his family.
For the novel, Shaw draws on his own experiences in working for the radio with Himan Brown. [2] Matching a sub-plot of the novel, Shaw was named as a Communist in 1951 by the right-wing pamphlet Red Channels "because he signed a petition calling on the US Congress to review the convictions of fellow screenwriters Dalton Trumbo and John Howard Lawson". [3] Neither House Un-American Activities Committee nor Senator McCarthy are explicitly mentioned in the novel. According to Shaw himself, he "wanted to show the decent and average American faced with social pressures of which he doesn’t approve". [4]
Howard Winchester Hawks was an American film director, producer, and screenwriter of the classic Hollywood era. Critic Leonard Maltin called him "the greatest American director who is not a household name." Roger Ebert called Hawks "one of the greatest American directors of pure movies, and a hero of auteur critics because he found his own laconic values in so many different kinds of genre material." He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director for Sergeant York (1941) and earned the Honorary Academy Award in 1974.
Joseph Raymond McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death at age 48 in 1957. Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visible public face of a period in the United States in which Cold War tensions fueled fears of widespread communist subversion. He alleged that numerous communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers had infiltrated the United States federal government, universities, film industry, and elsewhere. Ultimately, he was censured by the Senate in 1954 for refusing to cooperate with, and abusing members of, the committee established to investigate whether or not he should be censured. The term "McCarthyism", coined in 1950 in reference to McCarthy's practices, was soon applied to similar anti-communist activities. Today, the term is used more broadly to mean demagogic, reckless, and unsubstantiated accusations, as well as public attacks on the character or patriotism of political opponents.
McCarthyism, also known as the Second Red Scare, was the political repression and persecution of left-wing individuals and a campaign spreading fear of alleged communist and Soviet influence on American institutions and of Soviet espionage in the United States during the late 1940s through the 1950s. After the mid-1950s, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had spearheaded the campaign, gradually lost his public popularity and credibility after several of his accusations were found to be false. The U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren made a series of rulings on civil and political rights that overturned several key laws and legislative directives, and helped bring an end to the Second Red Scare. Historians have suggested since the 1980s that as McCarthy's involvement was less central than that of others, a different and more accurate term should be used instead that more accurately conveys the breadth of the phenomenon, and that the term McCarthyism is, in the modern day, outdated. Ellen Schrecker has suggested that Hooverism, after FBI Head J. Edgar Hoover, is more appropriate.
The Manchurian Candidate is a 1962 American neo-noir psychological political thriller film directed and produced by John Frankenheimer. The screenplay is by George Axelrod, based on the 1959 Richard Condon novel The Manchurian Candidate. The film's leading actors are Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, and Angela Lansbury, with co-stars Janet Leigh, Henry Silva, and James Gregory.
Edward Roscoe Murrow was an American broadcast journalist and war correspondent. He first gained prominence during World War II with a series of live radio broadcasts from Europe for the news division of CBS. During the war he recruited and worked closely with a team of war correspondents who came to be known as the Murrow Boys.
Walter Winchell was a syndicated American newspaper gossip columnist and radio news commentator. Originally a vaudeville performer, Winchell began his newspaper career as a Broadway reporter, critic and columnist for New York tabloids. He rose to national celebrity in the 1930s with Hearst newspaper chain syndication and a popular radio program. He was known for an innovative style of gossipy staccato news briefs, jokes, and Jazz Age slang. Biographer Neal Gabler claimed that his popularity and influence "turned journalism into a form of entertainment".
Cormac McCarthy was an American writer who authored twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays, and three short stories, spanning the Western and postapocalyptic genres. His works often include graphic depictions of violence, and his writing style is characterised by a sparse use of punctuation and attribution. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American novelists.
Gertrude Berg was an American actress, screenwriter, and producer. A pioneer of classic radio, she was one of the first women to create, write, produce, and star in a long-running hit when she premiered her serial comedy-drama The Rise of the Goldbergs (1929), later known as The Goldbergs. Her career achievements included winning a Tony Award and an Emmy Award, both for Best Lead Actress.
Frequency is a 2000 American science fiction thriller film starring Dennis Quaid, Jim Caviezel, Andre Braugher, Elizabeth Mitchell, Shawn Doyle, Melissa Errico, and Noah Emmerich.
Irwin Shaw was an American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and short-story author whose written works have sold more than 14 million copies. He is best known for two of his novels: The Young Lions (1948), about the fate of three soldiers during World War II, which was made into a film of the same name starring Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, and Rich Man, Poor Man (1970), about the fate of two brothers and a sister in the post-World War II decades, which in 1976 was made into a popular miniseries starring Peter Strauss, Nick Nolte, and Susan Blakely.
Rich Man, Poor Man is a 1969 novel by Irwin Shaw. It is the last of the novels of Shaw's middle period before he began to concentrate, in his last works such as Evening In Byzantium, Nightwork, Bread Upon The Waters and Acceptable Losses on the inevitability of impending death. The title is taken from the nursery rhyme "Tinker, Tailor". The novel was adapted into a 1976 miniseries.
Henry Morgan was an American humorist. He first became familiar to radio audiences in the 1930s and 1940s as a barbed but often self-deprecating satirist. In the 1950s and later he was a regular and cantankerous panelist on the game show I've Got a Secret as well as other game and talk shows.
Abraham Lincoln Polonsky was an American film director, screenwriter, essayist and novelist. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Body and Soul but in the early 1950s was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studios, after refusing to testify at congressional hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, in the midst of the McCarthy era.
Good Night, and Good Luck is a 2005 historical drama film about American television news directed by George Clooney, with the movie starring David Strathairn, Patricia Clarkson, Jeff Daniels, Robert Downey Jr., and Frank Langella as well as Clooney himself. The film was co-written by Clooney and Grant Heslov, and it portrays the conflict between veteran journalist Edward R. Murrow (Strathairn) and U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, especially relating to the anti-communist Senator's actions with the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
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The Manchurian Candidate is a novel by Richard Condon, first published in 1959. It is a political thriller about the son of a prominent U.S. political family who is brainwashed into being an unwitting assassin for a Communist conspiracy. The novel has twice been adapted into a feature film with the same title: the first was released in 1962 and the second in 2004.
Himan Brown, also known as Hi Brown, was an American producer of radio and television programs. Over seven decades, Brown produced and directed more than 30,000 radio shows, for all of the major radio networks and syndication. He worked with such actors as Helen Hayes, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, Gregory Peck, Frank Sinatra and Orson Welles.
My Son John is a 1952 American political drama film directed by Leo McCarey and starring Helen Hayes, Van Heflin, Robert Walker and Dean Jagger. Walker plays the title character, a middle-class college graduate whom his parents suspect may be a communist spy.
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