Morris Dickstein

a cultural history of the Great Depression

Dancing in the dark

Widely admired as the definitive cultural history of the 1960s, this groundbreaking work finally reappears in a new edition.

American Culture in the Sixties

Gates of Eden

The 25 years after World War II were a fertile period for the American novel and an era of transformation in American society. Offering a social as well as literary history, Dickstein provides a frank assessment of more than 20 key figures.

The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970

Leopards in the Temple

Honoré de Balzac

Two very intelligent, very idealistic young women leave the convent school where they became the fastest of friends to return to their families and embark on their new lives. For Ren�e de Maucombe, this means an arranged marriage with a country gentleman of Provence, a fine if slightly dull man for whom she feels admiration but nothing more. Meanwhile, Louise de Chaulieu makes for her family's house in Paris, intent on enjoying her freedom to the fullest: glittering balls, the opera, and above all, she devoutly hopes, the torments and ecstasies of true love and passion. What will come of these very different lives? Despite Honor� de Balzac's title, these aren't memoirs; rather, this is an epistolary novel. For some ten years, these two will--enthusiastically if not always faithfully--keep up their correspondence, obeying their vow to tell each other every tiny detail of their strange new lives, comparing their destinies, defending and sometimes bemoaning their choices, detailing the many changes, personal and social, that they undergo. As Balzac writes, "Ren�e is reason...Louise is wildness...and both will lose." Balzac being Balzac, he seems to argue for the virtues of one of these lives over the other; but Balzac being Balzac, that argument remains profoundly ambiguous. "I would," he once wrote, "rather be killed by Louise than live a long life with Ren�e."

The Memoirs of Two Young Wives

William Dean Howells

After the Civil War, rapid industrialization created a new crop of American multimillionaires. Although as wealthy as the aristocrats" of Boston and New York, the nouveaux riches were rejected by those arrogant guardians of traditional society because of their uneducated" tastes and uncouth styles. This class conflict is at the core of The Rise of Silas Lapham, one of the first American novels of manners, one of the first to look at the American businessman and self-made millionaire, and one of the first to employ realism--a style that would come to dominate twentieth-century American fiction. A devoted husband and father, fairly decent employer, and mostly honest businessman, Silas Lapham has used his father's small paint company to amass a large fortune. But he yearns to enter society" and for his two daughters, Penelope and Irene, to marry well. However, blue-blooded Tom Corey's love for one of the Lapham daughters is thwarted by his mother, who believes Penelope is an overly independent social climber. Meanwhile, Silas's efforts to be accepted by the Boston Brahmins lead him into dangerous financial waters that threaten to drown his business and swallow his family.

The Rise of Silas Lapham

Barbara Haskell

Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and Thirties New York is the first major assessment of the work of 'American Scene' artist Reginald Marsh (1898-1954) in over 30 years. Focusing on 60 paintings, drawings, prints, photographs and sketches, drawn from public and

Reginald Marsh and Thirties New York

Swing Time

Examines the individual author's entire body of work and on his/her single works of literature.

Robert Frost

A cultural history of the 1930s explores the anxiety, despair, and optimism of the period, exploring how the period culture provided a dynamic lift to the country's morale.

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

Leo Braudy

Bing Professor of English Leo Braudy

Investigates the careers and cinematic accomplishments of twenty-three great directors including Antonioni, Bergman, Capra, Chaplin, Fellini, Hitchcock, Truffaut, and Welles

A Critical Anthology

Great Film Directors

Widely admired as the definitive cultural history of the 1960s, this groundbreaking work finally reappears in a new edition. The turbulent 1960s, almost from its outset, produced a dizzying display of cultural images and ideas that were as colorful as the psychedelic T-shirts that became part of its iconography. It was not, however, until Morris Dickstein's landmark Gates of Eden, first published in 1977, that we could fully grasp the impact of this raucous decade in American history as a momentous cultural epoch in its own right, as much as Jazz Age America or Weimar Germany. From Ginsberg and Dylan to Vonnegut and Heller, this lasting work brilliantly re-creates not only the intellectual and political ferment of the decade but also its disillusionment. What results is an inestimable contribution to our understanding of twentieth-century American culture.

Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties

Presents critical essays on Fitzgerald's novel about the 1920's, discussing major themes, the Jazz Age, and its early favorable critical reception.

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

A respected cultural critic introduces his Lower East Side childhood with his boisterous and close-knit Jewish family and reflects on the many different forms of education he encountered in the turbulent American culture of the postwar decades.

A Sentimental Education

Why Not Say What Happened

Finalist for the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism: from Agee to Astaire, Steinbeck to Ellington, the creative energies of the Depression against a backdrop of poverty and economic disaster. Only yesterday the Great Depression seemed like a bad memory, receding into the hazy distance with little relevance to our own flush times. Economists assured us that the calamities that befell our grandparents could not happen again, yet the recent economic meltdown has once again riveted the world’s attention on the 1930s. Now, in this timely and long-awaited cultural history, Morris Dickstein, whom Norman Mailer called “one of our best and most distinguished critics of American literature,” 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. Just as Dickstein radically transforms our understanding of Depression literature, he explodes the prevailing myths that 1930s musicals and movies were merely escapist. Whether describing the undertone of sadness that lurks just below the surface of Cole Porter’s bubbly world or stressing the darker side of Capra’s wildly popular films, he shows how they delivered a catharsis of pain and an evangel of hope. Dickstein suggests that the tragic and comic worlds of Broadway and Hollywood preserved a radiance and energy that became a bastion against social suffering. Dancing in the Dark describes how FDR’s administration recognized the critical role that the arts could play in enabling “the helpless to become hopeful, the victims to become agents.” Along with the WPA, the photography unit of the FSA represented a historic partnership between government and art, and the photographers, among them Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, created the defining look of the period. The symbolic end to this cultural flowering came finally with the New York World’s Fair of 1939–40, a collective event that presented a vision of the future as a utopia of streamlined modernity and, at long last, consumer abundance. Retrieving the stories of an entire generation of performers and writers, Dancing in the Dark shows how a rich, panoramic culture both exposed and helped alleviate the national trauma. This luminous work is a monumental study of one of America’s most remarkable artistic periods.

In a famous passage in The Red and the Black, the French writer Stendhal described the novel as a mirror being carried along a roadway. In the twentieth century this was derided as a naïve notion of realism. Instead, modern writers experimented with creative forms of invention and dislocation. Deconstructive theorists went even further, questioning whether literature had any real reference to a world outside its own language, while traditional historians challenged whether novels gave a trustworthy representation of history and society. In this book, Morris Dickstein reinterprets Stendhal's metaphor and tracks the different worlds of a wide array of twentieth-century writers, from realists like Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather, through modernists like Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, to wildly inventive postwar writers like Saul Bellow, Günter Grass, Mary McCarthy, George Orwell, Philip Roth, and Gabriel García Márquez. Dickstein argues that fiction will always yield rich insight into its subject, and that literature can also be a form of historical understanding. Writers refract the world through their forms and sensibilities. He shows how the work of these writers recaptures--yet also transforms--the life around them, the world inside them, and the universe of language and feeling they share with their readers. Through lively and incisive essays directed to general readers as well as students of literature, Dickstein redefines the literary landscape--a landscape in which reading has for decades been devalued by society and distorted by theory. Having begun with a reconsideration of realism, the book concludes with several essays probing the strengths and limitations of a historical approach to literature and criticism.

Morris Dickstein

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