Edgar (Parks) Snow - Works

Journalist and writer, born in Kansas City, Missouri, USA. After graduating from the Columbia School of Journalism, he went to China as a reporter (1928–40) and for the rest of his life wrote on Chinese affairs. In the first foreign news reports from Yenan in the mid-1930s, collected as Red Star over China (1937), he presented the Communist revolutionaries as a popular and potentially victorious force at a time when Western governments were committed to Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists. In his post-China years, he was a writer and lecturer based in the USA and in Switzerland (after 1959). His later books, including The Other Side of the River (1962) and The Long Revolution (1972), provided the West with valuable first-hand information and analysis during China's years of isolation. On his periodic trips to China, he was given exclusive interviews and privileged access as an old and trusted friend of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai.

15 February 1972 in Genève) was an American journalist known for his books and articles on Communism in China and the Chinese Communist revolution. He is believed to be the first Western journalist to interview Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong, and is perhaps best known for Red Star Over China (1937) an account of the Chinese Communist movement from its foundation until the late 1930s. While in China, he wrote and published numerous articles and books. In 1937 he published the work that was to make him famous, Red Star Over China, an account of the Communist revolutionary movement from its founding, through the Long March, and up until the Communists settled temporarily in the Yan'an base area in the mid-1930s. Snow conducted interviews for much of the books contents in Yan'an, introducing the world to the Communist Party of China leader Mao Zedong. The Communist Party of China he described in the book would, under Mao's leadership, go on to found the People's Republic of China in October of 1949. Snow traveled to India, China and Russia to report on World War II from the perspective of those countries.

He returned to China in 1960 and 1964 and interviewed Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. In 1970, he made a final trip to China and was told that President Richard Nixon would be welcome to visit either officially or as a private citizen.

Snow died of cancer on February 15, 1972, the week President Nixon was travelling to China.

Works

Red Star Over China Red China Today: The Other Side of the River The Battle for Asia Far Eastern Front People On Our Side (Random House, 1944) China, Russia, and the USA The Long Revolution Living China: Modern Chinese Short Stories