The Free World: Artwork and Thought within the Chilly Warfare

“An engrossing and impossibly wide-ranging venture . . . In The Free World, each seat is an effective one.” ―Carlos Lozada, The Washington Submit

“The Free World sparkles. Totally unique, fantastically written . . . One hopes Menand has a sequel in thoughts. The bar is ready very excessive.” ―David Oshinsky, The New York Instances E book Evaluate

Named a most anticipated e-book of April by The New York Instances | The Washington Submit | Oprah Day by day

In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–profitable The Metaphysical Membership, Louis Menand provides a brand new mental and cultural historical past of the postwar years

The Chilly Warfare was not only a contest of energy. It was additionally about concepts, within the broadest sense―financial and political, creative and private. In The Free World, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize–profitable scholar and critic Louis Menand tells the story of American tradition within the pivotal years from the top of World Warfare II to Vietnam and reveals how altering financial, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the thoughts.

How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of ardour and beliefs give option to a brand new sensibility outlined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the best of “freedom” utilized to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation by way of artwork and even crime? With the wit and perception acquainted to readers of The Metaphysical Membership and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt’s Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage’s residencies at North Carolina’s Black Mountain School, and the Memphis studio the place Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a brand new music for the American teenager. He examines the submit struggle vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of summary expressionism and pop artwork, Allen Ginsberg’s friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin’s transformation right into a Civil Proper spokesman, Susan Sontag’s challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity legal guidelines, and the rise of the New Hollywood.

Stressing the wealthy move of concepts throughout the Atlantic, he additionally reveals how Europeans performed a significant position in selling and influencing American artwork and leisure. By the top of the Vietnam period, the American authorities had misplaced the ethical status it loved on the finish of the Second World Warfare, however America’s once-despised tradition had develop into revered and adored. With unprecedented verve and vary, this e-book explains how that occurred.