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Beat the Devil is a 1951 thriller written by Claud Cockburn under the pseudonym James Helvick. [1] Cockburn used the pseudonym, though he had left the British Communist Party in 1947, he was still considered a "Red" during the early years of the Cold War, which was rife with anti-communist sentiment. Beat the Devil was Cockburn's first novel, and the first work of fiction that the long-time political journalist had written since the 1920s. The title was later used by Cockburn's son Alexander for his regular column in The Nation.
![](http://upload.luquay.com/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/ab/BeatTheDevil.jpg/220px-BeatTheDevil.jpg)
The novel was published in the United Kingdom by Boardman and in the United States by J. B. Lippincott & Co. The publishers paid Cockburn an advance of between £200–300 and $750, respectively. Beat the Devil was made into a 1953 film by director John Huston, who paid Cockburn £3,000 for the rights to the book and screenplay. Cockburn collaborated with Huston on the early drafts of the script, but the credit went to Truman Capote.
References
edit- ^ CLAUD COCKBURN, BRITISH WRITER AND SOCIAL CRITIC, IS DEAD AT 77 (Dec. 16, 1981) Saxon, Wolfgang, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/1981/12/16/obituaries/claud-cockburn-british-writer-and-social-critic-is-dead-at-77.html
External links
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