In 1949, the poet Pablo Neruda escaped anti-communist Chile on horseback, scrambling across Andean mountains and rivers disguised as an ornithologist named Antonio Ruiz. During his flight, his masterpiece, Canto General, was printed as samizdat, in secret, disguised by a false dust jacket.

A year later, poets George and Mary Oppen crossed into the Sonoran Desert, fleeing F.B.I. agents who had surveilled their house in the L.A. suburbs. The Oppens spent most of the 1950s as political refugees in Mexico City, exiled from the United States for their relief work to stop evictions during the Great Depression, carried out under the auspices of the Communist Party.

Wanted for a crime she did not commit, Angela Davis went on the run twenty years after the Oppens, describing the struggle against panic in her nightly safehouse transfers: “Living as a fugitive means resisting hysteria, distinguishing between the creations of a frightened imagination and the real signs that the enemy is near.”

What did these refugees experience as they fled their homelands and friends? Bringing together a page-turning roster of refugees the author of the widely acclaimed Finks looks at artists and activists who took flight, imaginative and physical, to escape the oppression of presidencies stretching from Harry Truman to Donald Trump. In these pages are new profiles of Lorraine Hansberry, Malcolm X, Paul Robeson, Diego Rivera, Angela Davis, Gabriel García Márquez, Graham Greene, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Octavio Paz, Frances Stonor Saunders, Guatemalan guerrilla fighter Everado and his American wife, Jennifer Harbury, Nobel Peace laureate Rigoberta Menchú, deposed Honduran President Mel Zelaya and murdered Lenca environmentalist Berta Cáceres.

At once a group portrait of geniuses of creative escape, Flights is also a prehistory (and indictment) of American mass surveillance, a scourge still spreading today.

xxx pages • Paperback ISBN 978-1-68219-431-7 • E-book ISBN 978-1-68219-432-4