Roosevelt, New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia, United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis, and the novelist Pearl Buck, who'd won the Nobel Prize in 1938 and whose picture he copied from the jacket of one of her bestsellers.

NPR: Roth Rewrites History with a 'Plot Against America'

They are about the men and women active in the communist and labour movements in America during the late 1920s and 1930s, and on into the McCarthy aftermath Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, Edmund Wilson, John L. Lewis (a union boss), the Reuther brothers, who brought General Motors to its knees, and others, many now forgotten.

ECONOMIST: Small but perfectly formed | The