Snow studied journalism at the University of Missouri, where he joined the Zeta Phi chapter of Beta Theta Pi, but moved to New York City before graduating. He made some money in the stock market and sold out before the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Wanting to use the money he embarked on an around the world tour in 1928, but never made it past Shanghai. He stayed in China until 1941.
He quickly found work with the
China Weekly Review, edited by J.B. Powell, a fellow graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism. In his early years he was an enthusiast for Chiang Kai-shek, noting that he had more Harvard graduates in his cabinet than there were in Franklin Roosevelt's. In 1932 he married Helen Foster Snow, who was working in the American Consulate until she could begin her own career in journalism. In 1933, after a honeymoon in Japan, the couple moved to Beiping, as Beijing was called at that point. He prepared his book
Far Eastern Front, filed occasional articles for American outlets, and taught journalism part-time at Yenching University. They borrowed works on current affairs from the Yenching library and read classics of Marxism. The couple became acquainted with student leaders of the anti-Japanese December 9th Movement. Through their contacts with the underground communist network, Snow was invited to visit Mao Zedong's headquarters.
Writing 'Red Star Over China'
In June 1936, Snow and his friend George Hatem, whose presence was kept secret, went to Xi'an and from there were taken through the military quarantine lines to Bao'an, where he spent nearly three months. Snow had been preparing to write a book on the Communist movement in China for several years, and had even signed a contract at one point. However, his most important contribution was the interviews he conducted with the top leaders of the party. After he returned to Beijing in the fall, he wrote frantically. First he published a short account in
China Weekly Review, then a series of publications in Chinese.
Red Star Over China, published first in London in 1937, was given credit for introducing both Chinese and foreign readers not so much to the Communist Party, which was reasonably well known, but to Mao Zedong. Mao was not, as had been reported, dead, and Snow reported that Mao was a political reformer, not the purely military or radical revolutionary he had been during the 1920s. After the outbreak of war in 1937, the Snows were founding members of the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives. Edgar again visited Mao in Yan'an in 1939.
Later Journalism
Snow and his wife returned to the United States in 1941, but they soon parted, and divorced after the war. In April 1942 the
Saturday Evening Post sent him abroad as a war correspondent. Snow traveled to India, China and Russia to report on World War II from the perspective of those countries. In Russia he shared his observations on the Battle of Stalingrad with the American Embassy. At times, Snow's defense of various undemocratic Allied governments took on the character of blatant war propaganda, not neutral journalistic observation, but Snow defended his reporting, stating
in this international cataclysm brought on by fascists it is no more possible for any people to remain neutral than it is for a man surrounded by bubonic plague to remain “neutral” toward the rat population. Whether you like it or not, your life as a force is bound either to help the rats or hinder them. Nobody can be immunized against the germs of history.
By 1944, Snow was wavering on the question of whether Mao and the Chinese Communists were actually "agrarian democrats" and not dedicated Communists bent on totalitarian rule, a view encouraged by Mao and his party leadership. His 1944 book
People On Our Side emphasized their role in the fight against fascism. In a speech, he described Mao and the Communist Chinese as a progressive force who desired a democratic, free China, not a communist one-party state. Writing for
The Nation, Snow stated that the Chinese communists "happen to have renounced, years ago now, any intention of establishing communism [in China] in the near future." After the war, Snow would retreat from this view of the Chinese communists as a democratic movement.
Because of his relationships with communists and his highly favorable treatment of them as a war correspondent, Snow became an object of suspicion following World War II. During the McCarthy period, he was questioned by the FBI and asked to disclose the extent of his Communist activities. In published articles, Snow lamented what he saw as the one-sided, conservative, and anti-communist mood of the United States. Later in the 1950s, he published two more books about China:
Random Notes on Red China (1957), a research aid for scholars containing previously unused China material; and
Journey to the Beginning (1958), an autobiographical account of events prior to 1949. However, Snow found it increasingly difficult to make a living through his writing, and he decided to leave the United States in the 1950s. He moved with his second wife, Louis Wheeler Snow, to Switzerland, but retained his American citizenship.
Return to China
He returned to China in 1960 and 1964 and interviewed Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, as well as travelling extensively and talking to people. His 1963 book
The Other Side of the River details this, including his reasons for denying that China's 1959-1961 crisis was actually a famine.
In 1970, he made a final trip to China and was told that President Richard Nixon would be welcome to visit either officially or as a private citizen. The White House followed this visit with interest but distrusted Snow and his pro-communist reputation. When Snow came down with pancreatic cancer, Zhou Enlai dispatched a team of Chinese doctors to Switzerland, including George Hatem. Snow died on February 15, 1972, the week President Nixon was traveling to China, and did not live to see the normalization of relations.
After his death, his ashes were divided into two parts, one of which was buried near the Hudson River and the other scattered at Peking University, which had taken over the campus of Yenching University, where he had taught in the 1930s.
