The period of the Cold War is an interesting era regarding the relationship between the United States and the Eastern European countries. So limited amount of information was exchanged between the two poles of the world that it would be worth a deeper analysis to find out what exactly the picture was of each other in the conscious of everyday people of the two opposing countries. That is why my final decision was a topic that is connected to the 1970’s socialist Hungary and obviously relevant to the United States of America. Consequently my thesis focuses on the image created about the USA in the 1970’s Hungary, during a decade that brought some relief to the tensions of the Cold War, but still maintained the hostility between the poles of the world: Communism and Capitalism. In this paper, I will analyze how socialist travel literature was used to influence Hungarians’ cognition of the USA, so that this remote country appeared to be a bad or at least worse place than our homeland. The emphasis is always on the dark side of the United States: high criminal rates, poverty and low living standards, moral crisis; and the authors tend to justify the superiority of Communism.