Written originally for a special issue of The New Yorker and reissued here with a new forward by the author, Within the Context of No Context is George W. S. Trow's brilliant exposition on the state of American culture and twentieth-century life. Published to widespread acclaim, Within the Context of No Context became an immediate classic and is, to this day, a favorite work of writers and critics alike. Both a chilling commentary on the times in which it was written and an eerie premonition of the future, Trow's work locates and traces, describes and analyzes the components of change in contemporary America -- a culture increasingly determined by the shallow worlds of consumer products, daytime television, and celebrity heroes. "This elegant little book is essential reading for anyone interested in the demise, the terminal silliness, of our culture." -- John Irving, The New York Times Book Review; "In this elegant, poignant essay, written with the grace of a master stylist, George Trow articulates the accelerated impermanence of American culture with a precision that is both flaunting and devastating." -- Rudy Wurlitrer; "Within the Context of No Context is a masterpiece of the century that belongs on a shelf next to Theodore Adorno's Minima Moralia and Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle." -- Michael Tolkin; "Within the Context of No Context may appear to be a book of the mind, for it is suffused with such a keen intelligence, but it is actually a book of the heart -- passionate, brave, and stirring." -- Sue Halpern.

"Original, provocative and possibly prophetic."-- The New York Times

When his classic Within the Context of No Context was first published, George W. S. Trow parsed television's overwhelming dominance over America's consciousness. In My Pilgrim's Progress, he returns with a provocative tour of politics and the media to show "how 1950 got to be 1998."

The son of a tabloid journalist, Trow was raised in the "Deepest Roosevelt Aesthetic," and found himself seduced by the ordinaryness of the Eisenhower era. It was a time when the Old World was giving way to the New. Perusing The New York Times of February 1950, he gives us America at the peak of its power, with its politicians and celebrities (and the nearly hesitant advent of television) and the fresh terror of the H-bomb. At turns a cultural history, a eulogy, and a provocative commentary on contemporary America, My Pilgrim's Progress confirms Trow's place as one of our most brilliant and incisive social critics.

ORIGINALLY published in the June 11, 1984, "New Yorker, this lengthy essay is a sharp-edged inquiry into the generational institutions of our national life. With the same iconoclastic spirit and multi-layered prose that he interwove in his classic "Within the Context of No Context, George Trow tells the story of upstate New York's Black Rock Forest--a thirty-eight-hundred-acre site overlooking the Hudson River--through the lives of the men who were connected to it and through the larger histories of Harvard University, US. conservation policies, and physics and biology. The men: banker James Stillman; his son, Ernest Stillman, a medical doctor who inherited the land that would become the Black Rock Forest in 1928 and who wanted to make it healthy and useful; the legendary Gifford Pinchot, appointed chief forester of the U.S. in 1898; and Richard Thornton Fisher, for many years the head of the Harvard Forest and the man who suggested to Ernest Stillman that he turn his inherited land into another demonstration forest. Harvard University: a more financially focused, less collegial environment than the one that had accepted the gift of the forest in 1949, now looking to shed responsibility for the forest without shedding the money its sale would bring. The challenge: how to manage, "how to value, a wilderness area of great biological diversity. In his brilliantly elastic fashion, Trow maneuvers images, symbols, ambiguities, ethics, journalistic wordplay, advertising tricks, and corporate doublespeak to create an intensely perceptive analysis of the cultural, political, and scientific communities. His richly developed story of the Harvard Black Rock Forest is ultimately a symbolic tale thatbears upon some of the most significant institutions, professions, and legacies in contemporary American life. A publisher's note reveals the fate of the forest.