Phillip Bonosky (March 7, 1916 – March 2, 2013) was an American novelist, journalist, and labor activist. A lifelong Communist, he wrote the coming-of-age novel Burning Valley and worked as cultural editor and Moscow correspondent for the Daily World. Bonosky was one of the first U.S. journalists to visit socialist China and one of the few to interview Vietnamese revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh.
Bonosky was born in 1916 in Duquesne, Pennsylvania, the fourth of eight children, to Lithuanian immigrant parents. As an adolescent he worked in the Duquesne Steel Works, but lost his job in the Great Depression and left home to find work. Norman Markowitz writes, "Bonosky joined large numbers of unemployed youth to ride the rails in the early 1930s, and eventually found himself in Washington, DC, living in a warehouse for transients that the early Roosevelt administration had provided."
While in Washington, D.C., Bonosky befriended the social worker Ann Terry White, wife of Treasury Department official Harry Dexter White. With her financial assistance, Bonosky enrolled in Wilson Teachers College and soon joined the Communist Party USA. (In 1948, when Harry Dexter White was investigated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) for possible Communist ties, letters exchanged between his wife and Bonosky were seized by government investigators as evidence against him.) In 1940, as President of the Washington division of the Workers Alliance of America, Bonosky met with Eleanor Roosevelt to discuss government cuts in Works Progress Administration programs, an event that was widely reported in the press. By the time the U.S. entered World War II, Bonosky was a full-time organizer for the Communist Party. Bonosky would go on to become one of the leading voices in the Party, while fighting for the rights of working-class people.