35 Facts About Edgar Snow

Edgar Parks Snow was an American journalist known for his books and articles on communism in China and the Chinese Communist Revolution.

Edgar Snow is best known for his book, Red Star Over China, an account of the Chinese Communist movement from its foundation until the late 1930s.

Edgar Parks Snow was born on July 19,1905, in Kansas City, Missouri.

Edgar Snow briefly studied journalism at the University of Missouri, and joined the Zeta Phi chapter of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity.

Edgar Snow made a little money in the stock market shortly before the Wall Street crash of 1929.

Edgar Snow arrived in Shanghai that summer and stayed in China for thirteen years.

Edgar Snow became friends with prominent writers and intellectuals, including Soong Ching-ling, the widow of Sun Yat-sen and an advocate of reform.

Edgar Snow arrived in India in 1931 with an introduction letter to Nehru from Agnes Smedley, an American left-wing journalist living in China.

Edgar Snow delivered it in Mumbai and Sarojini Naidu introduced him to her Communist sister Suhasini, who took him around to see mill workers.

Edgar Snow met Gandhi in Simla, but was not impressed.

Edgar Snow covered the Meerut conspiracy case trial in which three British communists were involved, and wrote three articles about India.

Edgar Snow began to make an international name for himself when he became correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post and widely traveled throughout China, often on assignment for the Chinese Railway Ministry.

Edgar Snow toured famine districts in Northwest China, visited what would later become the Burma Road, and reported on the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.

In June 1936, Edgar Snow left home with a letter of introduction from Soong Ching-ling and arrived at Xi'an.

Edgar Snow was accompanied by George Hatem, who had worked with the Party, whose presence on the trip Edgar Snow did not mention for many years.

Edgar Snow had been preparing to write a book about the Communist movement in China, and had even signed a contract at one point.

When Edgar Snow wrote, there were no reliable reports reaching the West about the Communist-controlled areas.

Edgar Snow was taken through the military quarantine lines to the Communist headquarters at Bao'an, where he spent four months interviewing Mao and other Communist leaders.

Edgar Snow claimed that he had been under no constraint, but made revisions in the book at the request of Mao, Zhou Enlai, and perhaps American communists who worried that Mao was creating splits in the International movement.

Edgar Snow reported that Mao was a sincere communist, a patriot committed to resisting the Japanese invasion and world-wide fascism, and a political reformer, not the purely military or radical revolutionary that he had been during the 1920s.

Edgar Snow reported on the Nanking Massacre, and he even reported on Japanese reactions to it, stating:.

Edgar Snow met them again a year later in Chongqing and he was reminded that:.

Edgar Snow's time reporting on the Second Sino-Japanese War would appear in his 1941 book "The Battle For Asia".

Shortly before the United States entered World War II, in 1941, Edgar Snow toured Japanese-occupied areas of Asia and wrote his second major book, Battle for Asia, about his observations.

Edgar Snow traveled to India, China, and Russia to report on World War II from the perspectives of those countries.

In 1949 Edgar Snow divorced Helen Foster and married his second wife, Lois Wheeler.

In published articles, Edgar Snow lamented about what he saw as the one-sided, conservative, and anti-communist mood in the United States.

Edgar Snow returned to China in 1960 and 1964, interviewed Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, traveled extensively, and talked to many people.

Edgar Snow reached an agreement with Time magazine to publish his final interview with Mao, including the Nixon invitation, provided the earlier interview with Zhou Enlai was published.

When Edgar Snow came down with pancreatic cancer and returned home after a surgery, Zhou Enlai dispatched a team of Chinese doctors to Switzerland, including George Hatem.

Edgar Snow died on February 15,1972, the week President Nixon was traveling to China, before he could see the normalization of relations.

Edgar Snow died of cancer, at the age of 66, at his home in Eysins near Nyon, Vaud, Switzerland.

In 1973 Lois Wheeler Edgar Snow went to China to bury half of her husband's ashes in the garden of Peking University.

Wheeler Edgar Snow issued statements of protest to the international press and threatened to remove her husband's remains from Chinese soil.

Edgar Snow's reporting from China in the 1930s has been both praised as prescient and blamed for the rise of Mao's communism.