ABSTRACT
The late 1960s witnessed the culmination of the remarkable political resurgence that had begun in 1960 with the student sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, against segregation and the student demonstrations in San Francisco against the House Committee on Un-American Activities. It is against this turbulent background that Doctorow fashioned his third novel. The Book of Daniel is a meditation on American politics in the form of a novel, an imaginative revisioning of the radical movement which attempts to bridge the generation gap and reconnect the new radicalism to its history. Doctorow’s choice of the Rosenberg case as the point of departure for his exploration of American radicalism is crucial. For no other single event reflects the betrayal of radical hopes and the paranoia of Cold War politics as clearly as the controversial trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for atomic espionage.
