Ludvík Vaculík played a major role in the life of postwar Czechoslovakia as a journalist and a writer. Starting out as an idealistic communist, he helped to promote socialism in his country in the 1950s. As an energetic and active journalist, he gradually discovered the limitations of the political system he had helped to build and started rebelling against it. In the 1960s Vaculík was an important member of the movement of intellectuals and writers who tried to reform the communist system by re-introducing democracy to Czechoslovak public life.

The Warsaw Pact armies invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968. During the two decades of the postinvasion political clampdown in the 1970s and the 1980s, Vaculík became a banned writer and was regarded as a dangerous subversive and a "reactionary." In the 1960s Vaculík became a major independent writer and journalist...