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Louis Adamic (; March 23, 1898 – September 4, 1951) was a Slovene American author and translator, mostly known for writing about and advocating for ethnic diversity of the United States.Shiffman, D. (2003) Rooting Multiculturalism: The Work of Louis Adamic, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
Swept up in a bloody demonstration in November 1913, Adamic was briefly jailed, expelled from school, and barred from any government educational institution. He was admitted to the Jesuit school in Ljubljana, but was unable to bring himself to go. "No more school for me. I was going to America," Adamic wrote. "I did not know how, but I knew that I would go."Adamic, Louis. Laughing in the Jungle: The Autobiography of an Immigrant in America. New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1932. Reprinted by Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969; pp. 10–35.
On December 31, 1913, at the age of 15, Adamic emigration to the United States.In his author's note to his autobiography, Laughing in the Jungle (1932), Adamic describes himself as being "a boy of fourteen and a half" in 1913, when he left his native country for America (p. ix). "Late in the afternoon of the last day of 1913 I was examined for entry into the United States, with about a hundred other immigrants who had come on the Niagara (p. 43).
He finally settled in a heavily ethnic Croatian fishing community of San Pedro, California. He became a naturalized United States citizen in 1918 as Louis Adamic.
All of Adamic's writings are based on his labor experiences in America and his former life in Slovenia. He achieved national acclaim in America in 1934 with his book The Native's Return, which was a bestseller directed against King Alexander's regime in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. This book gave many Americans their first real knowledge of the Balkans. In it, Adamic predicted that America would prosper by eventually "going left", i.e. adopting socialism.
He received the Guggenheim Fellowship award in 1932. During the Second World War he had supported the Yugoslav National liberation struggle and the establishment of a socialist Yugoslav federation. He founded the United Committee of South-Slavic Americans in support of Marshal Tito. From 1949 he was a corresponding member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
From 1940 onwards he served as editor of the magazine Common Ground. Adamic was the author of (1931); Laughing in the Jungle: The Autobiography of an Immigrant in America (1932); The Native's Return: An American Immigrant Visits Yugoslavia and Discovers His Old Country (1934); Grandsons: A Story of American Lives (1935, novel); Cradle of Life: The Story of One Man's Beginnings (1936, novel); The House in Antigua (1937, travel); My America (1938); From Many Lands (1940); Two-Way Passage (1941); What's Your Name? (1942); My Native Land (1943); Nation of Nations (1945); and The Eagle and the Roots (1950). Maxim Lieber was his literary agent, 1930–1931 and in 1946. In 1941, Adamic won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for From Many Lands.
Adamic was strongly opposed to the foreign policy followed by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and in 1946 wrote Dinner at the White House, which purported to be an account of a dinner party given by President Franklin D. Roosevelt at which Adamic and Churchill had both been present. After the proofs had been passed by publishers Harper and Brothers, an additional footnote was inserted in pages 151 and 152 which claimed that Churchill had opposed the National Liberation Front in Greece because they intended to scale down the rate of interest Greece was paying to Hambros Bank. The footnote further claimed that Hambros had "bailed Winston Churchill out of bankruptcy in 1912". The footnote appeared in the book when it was published, and a copy was circulated to every British Member of Parliament; when Churchill was alerted, he instructed his solicitors to issue a writ for libel. Harper and Brothers admitted the statement was untrue and Adamic also withdrew the claim and apologised; a substantial sum of damages was paid,"Mr. Churchill gets damages and apology", The Manchester Guardian, January 16, 1947, p. 3. reported by the Daily Express as £5,000."Libel on Churchill – damages £5,000", Daily Express, January 16, 1947, p. 3. the copy of Dinner at the White House in the British Library is held in the Suppressed Safe collection, inaccessible to readers.
His support for the Tito regime led to him being targeted by Nevada Senator Pat McCarran, who between May and September 1949, chaired a subcommittee to expose Soviet sympathizers among ethnic communities.John P. Enyeart, "Revolutionizing Cultural Pluralism: The Political Odyssey of Louis Adamic, 1932-1951", Journal of American Ethnic History, 34:3, (Spring 2015), pp. 58-90
Herbert Heisel, Hunterdon County Prosecutor, claimed that there was no reason to contradict the initial report of a suicide after further investigative and laboratory reports.
Arthur Derounian, present at the burial of Adamic, said he believed Adamic was murdered by the Soviet Government, who were threatened by the impending publication of The Eagle and the Roots. Other unnamed friends of Adamic were reported to have said that he had been threatened due to his support for Marshal Tito following Yugoslavia's recent exit from the Soviet Bloc.
Anton Smole, of Tanjug, alleged that Adamic had told of him of multiple occasions in which unknown men had threatened Adamic over his public sympathies as a writer for Titoism and the anti-Stalinist Left. Included in these claims is a reported visit to Adamic's farmhouse in October 1949 from an unknown man who warned him to stop submitting magazine articles that were friendly to Yugoslavia. Reportedly, Adamic had also been beaten severely on a California beach sometime in 1951, and left with the warning that he would be murdered if he continued writing about Yugoslavia.
Ethel Sharp, Adamic's typist, claimed he had told her of an incident in October 1950 in which four unidentified men visited Adamic's home and threateningly inquired about the progress of The Eagle and the Roots. However, Adamic was apparently unfazed by the visit. The episode had not been reported to the authorities.
In 1957, Howard L. Yowell, the then-current owner of the house where Adamic died, found $12,350 cash in a tin box within a wall of the farmhouse. The Flemington Police speculated that the money had belonged to Adamic.
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