When Edmund Wilson died in 1972 he was widely acclaimed as one of America's great literary critics. But it was often forgotten by many of his admirers that he was also a brilliant and penetrating critic of American life. In a literary career spanning half a century, Wilson commented on nearly every aspect of the American experience, and he produced a body of work on the subject that rivals those of Tocqueville and Henry Adams.

In this book George H. Douglas has distilled the essence from Wilson's many writings on America. An active reporter and journalist as much as a scholar, Wilson ranged from Harding to Nixon, from bathtub gin to marijuana. Douglas here surveys Wilson's mordant observations on the roaring twenties, the Great Depression, income tax, suburbia, sex, populist politics, the Vietnam War, the Great Society, the failure of American scholarship, pollution of the landscape, and the breakdown of traditional American values.

The Wilson who emerges from this survey is a historical writer with deep and unshakable roots in Jeffersonian democracy. Among his most far-seeing and poignant books are studies of the literature of the American Civil War and of the treatment of the American Indian. Pained by the crumbling moral order, Wilson was never completely at home in the twentieth century. In politics he was neither a liberal nor a conservative as those terms are understood today. He endured those ideologies and their adherents, but his genius was that he could bring them into hard focus from the perspective of the traditional American individualist who was too pained to accept the standardized commercial world that had grown up around him.

Edmund Wilson's America offers a distinctive overview of the nation's life and culture as seen and judged by its leading man of letters.

This history of skyscrapers examines how these tall buildings affected the cityscape and the people who worked in, lived in, and visited them. Much of the focus is rightly on the architects who had the vision to design and build America's skyscrapers, but attention is also given to the steelworkers who built them, the financiers who put up the money, and the daredevils who attempt to ""conquer"" them in some inexplicable pursuit of fame. The impact of the skyscraper on popular culture, particularly film and literature, is also explored.

From the arrival of the penny papers in the 1830s to the coming of radio news around 1930, the American newspaper celebrated its Golden Age and years of greatest influence on society. Born in response to a thirst for news in large eastern cities such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, the mood of the modern metropolitan papers eventually spread throughout the nation. Douglas tells the story of the great innovators of the American press--men like Bennett, Greeley, Bryant, Dana, Pulitzer, Hearst, and Scripps. He details the development of the bond between newspapers and the citizens of a democratic republic and how the newspapers molded themselves into a distinctly American character to become an intimate part of daily life.

Technological developments in papermaking, typesetting, and printing, as well as the growth of advertising, gradually made possible huge metropolitan dailies with circulations in the hundreds of thousands. Soon journalism became a way of life for a host of publishers, editors, and reporters, including the early presence of a significant number of women. Eventually, feature sections arose, including comics, sports, puzzles, cartoons, advice columns, and sections for women and children. The hometown daily gave way to larger and impersonal newspaper chains in the early twentieth century. This comprehensive and lively account tells the story of how newspapers have influenced public opinion and how public demand has in turn affected the presentation of the news.

Precisely how and why radio developed as it did is a fascinating story, told with authority in this book. Of interest to both the specialist and the general reader, this history concentrates on the years between 1920 and 1930 in the United States when radio was rapidly growing and changing. It covers all important areas in the development of the radio industry: business, programming, regulation, finance, the manufacturing of radio sets and equipment, the development of technology, the rise of networks, and the flowering of radio as a medium of entertainment and news.