In June convicted atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg died in the electric chair, leaving two orphaned boys (a half-century later, Soviet documents confirmed Ethel’s innocence.) The prosecution had been spearheaded by an ambitious young lawyer named Roy Cohn, who now was now Chief Counsel for Senator McCarthy’s committee. Cohn and his friend G. David Schine left on a book-banning junket through American government libraries in Europe, to the embarrassment of the American diplomatic corps, and the great entertainment of the European press. When Schine was drafted later that year, Cohn’s threats to retaliate by exposing the Army as riddled with Reds eventually led to McCarthy’s condemnation by the Senate.

Around the world there was turmoil. America was bogged down in an undeclared war in Korea. In Viet Nam, France (with quiet American help) struggled to hold onto the vestiges of its Indochina empire, while back in Paris governments spun in and out of power through a revolving door. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin died. America announced it had the H-bomb; a few months later, so did the USSR, and the dance of terror between the two superpowers was joined.

Two of Eisenhower’s chief advisers made anti-Communism their personal crusade. John Foster Dulles was named Secretary of State, while across town his brother Allen was sworn in as the first civilian director of the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency. While Foster articulated the Domino Theory, Allen’s CIA would undertake spying on Americans, mind-control experiments, assassinations, and coups. Among its accomplishments were the subsidizing of cultural organizations, including the creation of the international leftist journal Encounter, edited by a former City College Trotskyite named Irving Kristol (later a founder of Neo-Conservatism) and British poet Stephen Spender. More significant, the CIA instituted a policy of nation-building, orchestrating the overthrow of the democratically-elected governments of reformers Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. Guatemalans got a repressive military junta, and Iranians saw the restoration of the U.S.-friendly Shah to the Peacock Throne.

It was a year for scientific miracles. Dr. Jonas Salk created a vaccine against polio. Drs. Francis Crick and James Watson described the structure of DNA as a double helix. And in Denmark, Dr. Christian Hamburger performed the world’s first sex change operation on a young American G.I. named George Jorgensen. This collection of letters from that eventful year casts a wide net over characters and events from the worlds of both fact and fiction. At the center of the action are a couple of characters who made their way from the Twenties and meet here for the first time: Nicholas Carraway, Republican functionary and onetime novelist, and Jacob Barnes, expatriate newsman. These gentlemen were previously thought to be the creations of a couple of novelists named F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, but it is revealed here for the first time that Nick and Jake are real historical figures. Fitzgerald and Hemingway never existed. That's our story, and we're sticking to it. History has been tweaked and bent to suit our purposes, but a decent respect for the opinions of mankind has kept us close to the line of essential historical truths. Some of the most beloved works of 20th Century American literature have been cheerfully pillaged. Names have not been changed, and the innocent will have to shift for themselves.