ABSTRACT
This chapter defines that terrorism as the method whereby an organized group or party sought to achieve its avowed aims chiefly through the systematic use of violence. Most of the research took place in the United States and had a definite connection with the Vietnam war and America's own internal turmoil. The fact that there had always been a great deal of violence outside the United States had somehow not quite registered. Fiction holds more promise for the understanding of the terrorist phenomenon than political science, but some words of caution are nevertheless called for. The uses of fiction as a source for the understanding of terrorism are not unlimited. A fairly realistic picture of "propaganda of the deed" emerges from several semi-documentary novels of varying literary quality published around the beginning of the century. The interpretation of terrorism in the Russian novel varied, of course, with the politics of the writer.
