Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression ... Cover Art

Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (Hardcover)

By: Morris Dickstein (Author)


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Review

"Dickstein's fluent, erudite, intriguing meditations turn up many resonances....[A] fascinating portrait of a distant era that still speaks compellingly to our own."

Publisher's note

A cultural history of the 1930s by the author of Gates of Eden explores the anxiety, despair, and optimism of the period while evaluating such factors as the Dust Bowl migrations, "screwball comedy," and swing band music to evaluate how period culture provided a dynamic lift to the country's morale.

A cultural history of the 1930s by the author of Gates of Eden explores the anxiety, despair, and optimism of the period while evaluating such factors as the Dust Bowl migrations, "screwball comedy," and swing band music to evaluate how period culture provided a dynamic lift to the country's morale.

In this timely and long-awaited cultural history of the 1930s, 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 distressed Americans at a time of dire economic dislocation. Bringing together a staggering range of materials-from epic Dust Bowl migrations and sharecropper photographs to zany screwball comedies, wildly popular swing bands, and streamlined Deco designs-this eloquent work highlights the pivotal role of culture and government intervention in hard times. Exploding the myth that Depression culture was merely escapist, it concentrates instead on the dynamic energy and insight the arts could provide and the enormous lift they gave to the nation's morale. Dancing in the Dark shows how our worst economic crisis, as it eroded American individualism and punctured the American dream, produced some of the greatest writing, photography, and mass entertainment ever seen in this country.

Annotation

In this engaging illustrated history, Morris Dickstein approaches the Great Depression from an unusual angle: the popular culture of the ‘30s. The people were impoverished, but the era they lived in was rich in culture--and in contradictions. Dickstein looks at the movies, the literature, the pop songs (including a close reading of the one from which he takes his title), and much more to give us a picture of an era that ran the gamut from feel-good movies like the screwball comedies to the grim realism of John Steinbeck's THE GRAPES OF WRATH, from the big band standards of the Swing Era to rise of the blues. Dickstein deepens our understanding of a period in American history that has special relevance in 2009, when his book was published.



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