"An engrossing and impossibly wide-ranging project . . . In The Free World, every seat is a good one." ―Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post
"The Free World
sparkles. Fully original, beautifully written . . . One hopes Menand
has a sequel in mind. The bar is set very high." ―David Oshinsky, The New York Times Book Review | Editors' Choice
Named a most anticipated book of April by The New York Times | The Washington Post | Oprah Daily
In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years
The
Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in
the broadest sense―economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World,
the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar and critic Louis Menand
tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of
World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological,
and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind.
How
did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology
give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation
and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes
that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of
self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar
to readers of The Metaphysical Club 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 College, and the
Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music
for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French
existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of
abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg’s friendship with
Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin’s transformation into a Civil Right
spokesman, Susan Sontag’s challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the
defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood.
Stressing
the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans
played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and
entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government
had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World
War, but America’s once-despised culture had become respected and
adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that
happened.
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