Early in his third year he joined a secret students' political club associated with the Yugoslav Nationalistic Movement that had recently sprung up in the South-Slavic provinces of Austria-Hungary.

Swept up in a bloody demonstration in November 1913, Adamic was briefly jailed, expelled from school, and barred from any government educational institution.

[10] Adamic first worked as a manual laborer and later at a Yugoslavian daily newspaper, Narodni Glas ("The Voice of the Nation"), that was published in New York.

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.

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,[12] reported by the Daily Express as £5,000.

[13] As of 2011[update] the copy of Dinner at the White House in the British Library is held in the Suppressed Safe collection, inaccessible to readers.

[18] 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.

Included in these claims is a reported visit to Adamic's farmhouse in October of 1949 from an unknown man who warned him to stop submitting magazine articles that were friendly to Yugoslavia.

[20] 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.

In any case, the demise seems to have inspired Stout's 1954 novel The Black Mountain, in which Nero Wolfe returns to his homeland to hunt down the killers of an old friend.