Scott Timberg

Argues that United States' creative class is fighting for survival and explains why this should matter to all Americans.

The Killing of the Creative Class

Culture Crash

Change is no stranger to us in the twenty-first century. We must constantly adjust to an evolving world, to transformation and innovation. But for many thousands of creative artists, a torrent of recent changes has made it all but impossible to earn a living. A persistent economic recession, social shifts, and technological change have combined to put our artists—from graphic designers to indie-rock musicians, from architects to booksellers—out of work. This important book looks deeply and broadly into the roots of the crisis of the creative class in America and tells us why it matters. Scott Timberg considers the human cost as well as the unintended consequences of shuttered record stores, decimated newspapers, music piracy, and a general attitude of indifference. He identifies social tensions and contradictions—most concerning the artist’s place in society—that have plunged the creative class into a fight for survival. Timberg shows how America’s now-collapsing middlebrow culture—a culture once derided by intellectuals like Dwight Macdonald—appears, from today’s vantage point, to have been at least a Silver Age. Timberg’s reporting is essential reading for anyone who works in the world of culture, knows someone who does, or cares about the work creative artists produce.

Dana Gioia

This new and necessary book ? a collection of author profiles, literary journalism, and speculative pieces about the Southland?s writing and publishing scene ? aims to capture the Southern California of here and now. We want to get at the Los Angeles that came after the gumshoes, the wisecracking Englishmen, after the Boosters, the Beats, and the boozers, after the despairing heroines of Joan Didion and the coked-up rich kids of Bret Easton Ellis. What is literary Los Angeles about now? Do these old templates survive, the way Hawthorne?s Puritans still echo through the fiction of New England and Cooper?s frontiersmen still stalk the literature of the mountain West? Without ignoring the city?s rich past, we have tried to focus on the present-living writers active in the final decade of the last century and the first few years of the new one. One guiding conviction is that the literary arts have taken their own shape in Southern California; from its poetry to its pulp fiction, a shape that often baffles its Eastern and British visitorsContributors include: Brendan Bernhard, Wanda Coleman, Jenny Factor, David Fine, Kate Gale, Lynell George, Peter Gilstrap, Laurence Goldstein, Pico Iyer, Ken Kelley, David Kipen, Ron Koertge, Suzanne Lummis, Susan Moffat, John Powers, David St. John, Sara Scribner, Paul Skenazy, Timothy Steele, Ariel Swartley, David L. Ulin, Amy Uyematsu, Gina Valdes, Marcos M. Villatoro, Charles Harper Webb, Chryss Yost.

Scott Timberg

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