The Serpent Sleeping By Edward Weismiller

This World War II espionage novel, a study of human character and betrayal, was first published in 1962 and has since established itself as "one of the most important of the genre" (Donald McCormick, in Who's Who in Spy Fiction). Long out of print, Edward Weismiller's suspenseful account of a young American intelligence officer, his Machiavellian superior and a young French woman who may have been a German spy, has finally been reissued as part of a library of "Classics of Espionage."

The author, a retired George Washington University professor, is nearly as remarkable as his book. Weismiller's poems were chosen for publication in the distinguished Yale Series of Younger Poets while he was still an undergraduate. Subsequently he became a Rhodes Scholar, a teaching fellow at Harvard, an OSS officer in Cherbourg, the author of a top secret history of double agents in the United States during the war, and, not least, a leading authority on Milton's prosody.