Abstract

Continental Nightmare

This article presents information on the works of journalist John L. Spivak. The author may or may not deserve the title of "America's greatest reporter." But no journalist equals him in ability to create living word-photographs of the world's madness, or in ability to hit a news target in dead center. And no journalist approaches him in his capacity to get on the "inside" of situations closed to outsiders or in his extraordinary skill in the art of social and political analysis through the medium of literary impressionism. Almost without exception these pen-pictures are at once absorbing "human interest" stories and vastly illuminating characterizations of the consequences of war, economic breakdown, mass psychoses, and fascist impoverishment and oppression throughout the great region between the Mediterranean and the Baltic, the Vistula and the Rhine.