Katharine Gregorio – The Double Life of Katharine Clark

In-store author event

If you loved Kate Moore’s The Radium Girls, Sonia Purnell’s A Woman of No Importance, or Rebecca Donner’s All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, you’ll be enthralled with this untold true story of how Katharine Clark, a trailblazing journalist, exposed the truth about Communism to the world.

In 1955, Katharine Clark, the first American woman wire reporter behind the Iron Curtain, saw something none of her male colleagues did. What followed became one of the most unusual adventure stories of the Cold War.

While on assignment in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Clark befriended a man who, by many definitions, was her enemy. But she saw something in Milovan Djilas, a high-ranking Communist leader who dared to question the ideology he helped establish, that made her want to work with him. It became the assignment of her life.

Against the backdrop of protests in Poland and a revolution in Hungary, she risked her life to ensure Djilas’s work made it past the watchful eye of the Yugoslavian secret police to the West.

She single-handedly was responsible for smuggling his scathing anti-Communism manifesto, The New Class, out of Yugoslavia and into the hands of American publishers. The New Class would go on to sell three million copies worldwide, become a New York Times bestseller, be translated into over 60 languages, and be used by the CIA in its covert book program.

Meticulously researched and written by Clark’s great-niece, Katharine Gregorio, The Double Life of Katharine Clark illuminates a largely untold chapter of the twentieth century. It shows how a strong-willed, fiercely independent woman with an ardent commitment to truth, justice and freedom put her life on the line to share ideas with the world, ultimately transforming both herself—and history—in the process.

Katharine Gregorio, the great niece of Katharine Clark, holds a BA in History from Dartmouth College, an MSc in International Relations from The London School of Economics and Political Science, and an MBA from The University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. She currently works in product marketing for Adobe.