David Hajdu

A vivid study of the lost world of comic books examines the influence of this pulpy, lavishly illustrated medium on the evolution of American popular culture in the wake of World War II and before the emergence of television as a mass medium, focusing on the battle against comic books by church groups, community elite, academics, and a right-wing Congress.

The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America

The Ten-Cent Plague

Discusses how Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Mimi and Richard Farina gathered together in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, chronicling their rise from coffeehouse folksingers to popular icons. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.

The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina

Positively 4th Street

A personal, idiosyncratic history of popular music that also may well be definitive, from the revered music critic From the age of song sheets in the late nineteenth-century to the contemporary era of digital streaming, pop music has been our most influential laboratory for social and aesthetic experimentation, changing the world three minutes at a time. In Love for Sale, David Hajdu—one of the most respected critics and music historians of our time—draws on a lifetime of listening, playing, and writing about music to show how pop has done much more than peddle fantasies of love and sex to teenagers. From vaudeville singer Eva Tanguay, the “I Don’t Care Girl” who upended Victorian conceptions of feminine propriety to become one of the biggest stars of her day to the scandal of Blondie playing disco at CBGB, Hajdu presents an incisive and idiosyncratic history of a form that has repeatedly upset social and cultural expectations. Exhaustively researched and rich with fresh insights, Love for Sale is unbound by the usual tropes of pop music history. Hajdu, for instance, gives a star turn to Bessie Smith and the “blues queens” of the 1920s, who brought wildly transgressive sexuality to American audience decades before rock and roll. And there is Jimmie Rodgers, a former blackface minstrel performer, who created country music from the songs of rural white and blacks . . . entwined with the sound of the Swiss yodel. And then there are today’s practitioners of Electronic Dance Music, who Hajdu celebrates for carrying the pop revolution to heretofore unimaginable frontiers. At every turn, Hajdu surprises and challenges readers to think about our most familiar art in unexpected ways. Masterly and impassioned, authoritative and at times deeply personal, Love for Sale is a book of critical history informed by its writer's own unique history as a besotted fan and lifelong student of pop.

Pop Music in America

Love for Sale

A Biography of Billy Strayhorn

Lush Life

The best-selling author of The Ten-Cent Plague presents a collection of essays on topics ranging from music and Elmer Fudd to the avant-garde and today's download culture, in a volume that includes a piece on the transformation of American film through the rise of the comic-book movie. Original.

Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture

Heroes and Villains

A poignant and hilarious oral history of a (fictitious) musical phenomenon.

A Fiction

Adrianne Geffel

Video Review's Best on Home Video

John Carey

Bert Williams—a Black man forced to perform in blackface who challenged the stereotypes of minstrelsy. Eva Tanguay—an entertainer with the signature song “I Don’t Care” who flouted the rules of propriety to redefine womanhood for the modern age. Julian Eltinge—a female impersonator who entranced and unnerved audiences by embodying the feminine ideal Tanguay rejected. At the turn of the twentieth century, they became three of the most provocative and popular performers in vaudeville, the form in which American mass entertainment first took shape. A Revolution in Three Acts explores how these vaudeville stars defied the standards of their time to change how their audiences thought about what it meant to be American, to be Black, to be a woman or a man. The writer David Hajdu and the artist John Carey collaborate in this work of graphic nonfiction, crafting powerful portrayals of Williams, Tanguay, and Eltinge to show how they transformed American culture. Hand-drawn images give vivid visual form to the lives and work of the book’s subjects and their world. This book is at once a deft telling of three intricately entwined stories, a lush evocation of a performance milieu with unabashed entertainment value, and an eye-opening account of a key moment in American cultural history with striking parallels to present-day questions of race, gender, and sexual identity.

The Radical Vaudeville of Bert Williams, Eva Tanguay, and Julian Eltinge

A Revolution in Three Acts

Billy Strayhorn was a black, gay man who wrote and arranged much of the music played by the Duke Ellington Orchestra. This biography gives a picture of a vanished culture.

Billy Strayhorn (1915-1967) was one of the most accomplished composers in American music, the creator of such standards as "Take the 'A' Train", yet all his life he was overshadowed by his friend and collaborator, Duke Ellington. Through scrutiny of Strayhorn's private papers and more than five hundred interviews, Hajdu revives Strayhorn as one of the most complex and tragic figures in jazz history.

David Hajdu

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