Snow, Edgar

Snow, Edgar (Parks) (1905–72) journalist, author; born in Kansas City, Mo. 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 U.S.A., and, after 1959, in Switzerland. 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.