The Populist Effect’: Promotion and Reception of American Literature in Turkey in the 1950s

Abstract

Despite the claim for ideological aloofness shared by most writers, the world of letters has seen outrageous political campaigns throughout history. During the 1950s as the ideological struggle between two world-views sharpened and anti-communist hysteria contaminated minds in the West, books and writers became the victims of a Cold War fury. In Turkey, the start of this era was signaled by several unprecedented events, including the expulsion of four prominent academics, writing for the leftist Yurt ve Diinya and Adimlar magazines, from Ankara University, and an attack by a crowd of nationalist students on the offices and printing presses of a leftist journal, Tan gazetesi. In the United States, the McCarthyist campaign not only interrogated writers but also banned books or encouraged attacks against politically heretical books by invoking hatred against dissident thoughts. These assaults against books and writers in both countries created a suffocating climate that lingered throughout the rest of the Cold War.