Who is Patty Hearst?
In a way, like Charles Foster Kane – the character inspired by her grandfather William Randolph Hearst – it depends on who tells the story. In February 1974, the 19-year-old newspaper heiress was snatched from her Berkeley apartment by a mysterious organization identifying itself as the Symbionese Liberation Army. The story of her abduction by and indoctrination into the SLA, and her reappearance as the beret-wearing, gun-wielding Tania, endures as one of the most outlandish cultural episodes of the 1970s. Years after she received a full pardon from President Clinton, questions still persist about the nature of her participation in the events following her kidnapping. Was Patty Hearst a brainwashed puppet of her captors or a girl coming of age and into her own consciousness while in the midst of a militant radical cell? Or both? Stephen King once described embarking on a novel to have been called The House on Value Street, which “was going to be a roman à clef about the kidnapping of P
