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.
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