As Moscow correspondent for the New York Times during the 1920s and 1930s, Walter Duranty enjoyed a virtual monopoly on news from the USSR. His dramatic and highly distinctive style of reporting made him a celebrity among the foreign correspondents of his day. In 1932 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches on the Soviet Union's first Five Year Plan, and his work was praised for its "scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment, and exceptional clarity." He became known during his twenty-year term in Moscow as the most knowledgeable source of information on the USSR and was quoted frequently by both the American right and left. A symbol of the antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union, Duranty became the focal point of the polemic between extremist viewpoints. He welcomed the controversy and was fond of saying to younger reporters, "If a foreign correspondent is looking for...