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Thirty Years of Treason

Excerpts From Hearings Before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1938-1968

Eric Bentley
January 2002     ISBN: 1560253681

This readable and totally absorbing collection reveals with painful clarity how HUAC grew from a panel investigating potentially subversive activities in a "dignified" manner to a monstrous and unrelenting accusatory force from which no one was safe.

What readers are saying

"The basic document with which all future studies of the [House Un-American Activities] Committee will have to begin." --Dalton Trumbo

"We have [Bentley] to thank for this bittersweet vaudeville show, this Congressional cabaret of the absurd, this peptic epic.... what he has done is give us HUAC as spectacle, and the perspective is shattering."
--Victor Navasky, New York Times

The testimony that the author has gleaned for this book from the thirty-year record of the House Un-American Activities Committee focuses on HUAC's treatment of artists, intellectuals, and performers. This highly readable and totally absorbing collection of significant excerpts from the hearings shows with painful clarity how HUAC grew from a panel that investigated possible subversive activities in a "dignified" manner to a huge, unrelenting accusatory finger from which almost no one was safe. This book serves as a warning for the future and at the same time makes living documents out of history.

About the Authors

Eric Bentley is the author of Bentley on Brecht: What is Theater? and other volumes of or about drama. Born in England in 1916, he was inducted into the (American) Hall of Fame in 1998.
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