With the end of World War II, Americans decided to begin the purge of any elements in the entertainment industry that could be considered "communist," "leftist," or simply "progressive."

The notorious "witch hunt" initiated by Senator Joseph McCarthy is one of the darkest chapters of recent American history, emblematic of all those campaigns that, under the guise of patriotism and ideological purity, attacked freedom of thought and creativity.

The author of this book himself found himself on McCarthy's Blacklist and was forced, for a decade, to live by selling scripts he wrote under someone else's name.

Today, fifty years later, Bernstein revives that atmosphere of the late '40s, which divided Hollywood into "traitors" and "patriots," into "diehards" and informants, casting his gaze on the roles played by some great figures of Hollywood such as Elia Kazan and Burt Lancaster, Bette Davis and Zero Mostel, Abraham Polonsky and John Garfield.