Don’t Knock Unless You’re Bleeding: Growing Up in Cold War Washington

At the height of their fame, Joseph and Stewart Alsop were household names. Syndicated columnists who reached 25 million readers at a time, they dined with the power brokers in Cold War Washington, from Presidents to spies, all the while cranking out columns, investigative stories, books, speeches and hundreds of letters. In Washington, information is power, and in those days, reporters and sources passed stories back and forth over cocktails and around the dinner table. Nobody noticed the children listening at the top of the stairs.

An award-winning fiction writer, Stewart’s only daughter, Elizabeth, finally turns her attention to the “two fathers” of her childhood recently portrayed in the play THE COLUMNIST, by David Auburn. In this memoir piece, Elizabeth sheds a unique light on the personalities behind these two powerful men, who not only recorded but influenced American history in the 1950s and ‘60s.

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“Vivid writing about a family engaged in national politics with its own complicated internal politics. Like most of us, when she was a child the author was in the middle of forces she wasn’t yet prepared to understand. The mixture of compassion and irony is potent.”

-Jeffrey Sweet, playwright, author of , COURT MARTIAL AT FORT DEVENS and many other award-winning plays

“A tough childhood in the hands of a skilled writer….the stuff that makes great memoirs.”

-Robin Wolaner, author of NAKED IN THE BOARDROOM