A controversial best-seller in 1977, The Public Burning has since emerged as one
of the most influential novels of our time. The first major work of contemporar
y fiction ever to use living historical figures as characters, the novel reimagi
nes the three fateful days in 1953 that culminated with the execution of alleged
atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Vice-President Richard Nixon - the vor
aciously ambitious bad boy of the Eisenhower regime - is the dominant narrator i
n an enormous cast that includes Betty Crocker, Joe McCarthy, the Marx Brothers,
Walter Winchell, Uncle Sam, his adversary The Phantom, and Time magazine incarn
ated as the National Poet Laureate. All of these and thousands more converge in
Times Square for the carnivalesque auto-da-fe at which the Rosenbergs are put to
death. And not a person present escapes implication in Cold War America's ruthl
ess public burning.
