Burnett Bolloten - Biography

Biography

Son of a Liverpool jeweler, he was born in the UK. Not wishing to follow his father's career, he began to travel around the Mediterranean. While on vacation in Barcelona, he was the witness of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that he covered as correspondent for the United Press agency. Initially a supporter, however not militant, of the Communist Party, he became disappointed with it during the course of the war, eventually coming to the conclusion that the Communists had betrayed the Republic. After the war he moved to Mexico and spent several years there with his first wife, Gladys Eve Green, putting together material about the war. This material is now held at the Hoover Institute of Stanford University.

After separating from his wife, in 1949 he immigrated to the United States, settling in Sunnyvale, California. For many years he worked as an historian and a real estate agent. He died of prostate cancer in November 1987.

His first work, The Grand Camouflage. The Communist conspiracy in the Spanish Civil War, was published in 1961 in London, since he did not find a publisher in the United States. His work was the object of criticism by Herbert Southworth, first in The Myth of Franco's Crusade (1963) and later in Julián Gorkin, Burnett Bolloten and the Spanish Civil War, in The Republic Besieged, a collective work edited by Paul Preston and Ann L. Mackenzie (1996). Southworth's criticism always hurt Bolloten. The issue got even worse when Bolloten's British publishers allowed the Spanish translation of the book by a Spanish editorial. The book was published in Spain with a biased translation as El gran engaño ("The Great Deception") and "Republicans" were translated as "Rojos" ("Reds"), and with a foreword by Franco's Minister of Propaganda and Tourism, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, which was especially irking to Bolloten.