Cold War Novels and Movies
Beyond their value as artistic expression or entertainment, novels and movies are cultural records that reflect a society's views and values. During the Cold War (1946–1991), novels and films reflected the anxieties and suspicions created by the specter of Communism and nuclear holocaust.
The Cold War is the label given to the state of geopolitical and ideological tensions between the two nuclear superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, dating from the end of World War II in 1945 through the early 1990s. This tension, never quite crossing the line into overt warfare, nevertheless resulted in decades of armed standoff and wars fought by proxy that could quite easily have escalated into nuclear war and global devastation. The British writer George Orwell, author of the famous Cold War dystopian novel 1984, used the phrase "cold war" in an article in 1945, thus anticipating the use of the term by the American statesman Bernard Baruch in a 1947 speech widely credited for providing this historical period with its name.
A large number of literary and cinematic works in America (and to a lesser extent Britain) dramatized the key issues of the conflict during the Cold War years.
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