Dancing in the Dark. A Cultural History of the Great...

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History - American Studies
Dancing in the Dark. A Cultural History...

Dancing in the Dark. A Cultural History of the Great Depression

Name: Dancing in the Dark. A Cultural History of the Great Depression
ISBN: 9780393338768

Morris Dickstein

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In this timely and long-awaited cultural history, Morris Dickstein explores the anxiety and hope, the despair and surprising optimism of a traumatized nation. Dickstein’s fascination springs from his own childhood, from a father who feared a pink slip every Friday and from his own love of the more exuberant side of the era: zany screwball comedies, witty musicals, and the lubricious choreography of Busby Berkeley. Whether analyzing the influence of film, design, literature, theater, or music, Dickstein lyrically demonstrates how the arts were then so integral to the fabric of American society.
While any lover of American literature knows Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, Dickstein also reclaims the lives of other novelists whose work offers enduring insights. Nathanael West saw Los Angeles as a vast dream dump, a Sargasso Sea of tawdry longing that exposed the pinched and disappointed lives of ordinary people, while Erskine Caldwell, his books Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre festooned with lurid covers, provided the most graphic portrayal of rural destitution in the 1930s. Dickstein also immerses us in the visions of Zora Neale Hurston and Henry Roth, only later recognized for their literary masterpieces.

Categories:

History - American Studies

Year:

2009

Publisher:

W. W. Norton & Company

Language:

english

Pages:

624

ISBN 10:

0393338762