The tragic events of September 11, 2001 brought to the surface memories of an earlier time of unprecedented national emergency--Pearl Harbor--and America's subsequent involvement in World War II. In this evocative cultural history, Richard Lingeman re-creates the events--historic, humorous, and tragic--and personalities of the American home front. From V-girls and V-mail, blackouts and the internment of the Japanese, to new opportunities for African-Americans and women, Lingeman recaptures a unique time in American history in this New York Times Notable Book.

Richard Lingeman vividly recreates the momentous years between VJ Day in 1945 and the beginning of the Korean War in 1950--America's postwar period, the age of anxiety characterized by the onset of the Red Scare and a nascent resistance to the growing Cold War consensus. The psychological hangover of World War II merged with burgeoning anti-communist paranoia and created a dark mood, a postwar noir phenomenon. The Noir Forties saw the arrival of McCarthyism and a bleak distortion of American political culture. Lingeman traces the attitudes, hopes and fears, prejudices, and collective dreams and nightmares of the times, as reflected in the media, popular culture, political movements, opinion polls, and psychological studies. Richard Lingeman has created a memorable portrait of what the American people lived, dreamed, and thought during the period that became the crucible in which the destiny of the next forty years was settled.

In the fall of 1920, Sinclair Lewis began a novel set in a fast-growing city with the heart and mind of a small town. For the center of his cutting satire of American business he created the bustling, shallow, and myopic George F. Babbitt, the epitome of middle-class mediocrity. The novel cemented Lewis’s prominence as a social commentator.

Babbitt basks in his pedestrian success and the popularity it has brought him. He demands high moral standards from those around him while flirting with women, and he yearns to have rich friends while shunning those less fortunate than he. But Babbitt’s secure complacency is shattered when his best friend is sent to prison, and he struggles to find meaning in his hollow life. He revolts, but finds that his former routine is not so easily thrown over.