ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how British and American writers and theorists in the first half of the twentieth century thought about art, propaganda, and truth. Focusing largely on literature written during World Wars I and II, this chapter shows that very few authors defined their art as propaganda or truth and instead used words like “political,” “resistance,” “information,” and “anti-fascist” to describe their wartime writing. However, while authors might have eschewed the term propaganda, that does not mean that they avoided producing it. As this chapter illustrates, what many authors wrote would now be considered “propaganda.” Moreover, even if the work itself was not obviously political or propagandistic, the uses to which it was put during wartime marked it as such, regardless of the author’s intent.
