"Ichiro Takayoshi's book argues that World War II transformed American literary culture. From the mid-1930s to the American entry into World War II in 1941, pre-eminent figures from Ernest Hemingway to Reinhold Neibuhr responded to the turn of the public's interest from the economic depression at home to the menace of totalitarian systems abroad by producing novels, short stories, plays, poems, and cultural criticism in which they prophesied the coming of a second world war and explored how America could prepare for it. The variety of competing answers offered a rich legacy of idioms, symbols, and standard arguments that were destined to license America's promotion of its values and interests around the world for the rest of the twentieth century. Ambitious in scope and addressing an enormous range of writers, thinkers, and artists, this book is the first to establish the outlines of American culture during this pivotal period."--Provided by publisher.

"Ichiro Takayoshi's book argues that World War II transformed American literary culture. From the mid-1930s to the American entry into World War II in 1941, pre-eminent figures from Ernest Hemingway to Reinhold Niebuhr responded to the turn of the public's interest from the economic depression at home to the menace of totalitarian systems abroad by producing novels, short stories, plays, poems, and cultural criticism in which they prophesied the coming of a second world war and explored how America could prepare for it. The variety of competing answers offered a rich legacy of idioms, symbols, and standard arguments that were destined to license America's promotion of its values and interests around the world for the rest of the twentieth century. Ambitious in scope and addressing an enormous range of writers, thinkers, and artists, this book is the first to establish the outlines of American culture during this pivotal period"--

Ichiro Takayoshi's book argues that World War II transformed American literary culture. From the mid-1930s to the American entry into World War II in 1941, pre-eminent figures from Ernest Hemingway to Reinhold Neibuhr responded to the turn of the public's interest from the economic depression at home to the menace of totalitarian systems abroad by producing novels, short stories, plays, poems, and cultural criticism in which they prophesied the coming of a second world war and explored how America could prepare for it. The variety of competing answers offered a rich legacy of idioms, symbols, and standard arguments that were destined to license America's promotion of its values and interests around the world for the rest of the twentieth century. Ambitious in scope and addressing an enormous range of writers, thinkers, and artists, this book is the first to establish the outlines of American culture during this pivotal period.

American Literature in Transition, 1930–1940 gathers together in a single volume preeminent critics and historians to offer an authoritative, analytic, and theoretically advanced account of the Depression era's key literary events. Many topics of canonical importance, such as protest literature, Hollywood fiction, the culture industry, and populism, receive fresh treatment. The book also covers emerging areas of interest, such as radio drama, bestsellers, religious fiction, internationalism, and middlebrow domestic fiction. Traditionally, scholars have treated each one of these issues in isolation. This volume situates all the significant literary developments of the 1930s within a single and capacious vision that discloses their hidden structural relations - their contradictions, similarities, and reciprocities. This is an excellent resource for undergraduate, graduate students, and scholars interested in American literary culture of the 1930s.

Traces the crisis period leading up to America's entry in World War II, describing the nation's polarized interventionist and isolation factions as represented by the government, in the press and on the streets, in an account that explores the forefront roles of British-supporter President Roosevelt and isolationist Charles Lindbergh. (This book was previously featured in Forecast.)

Focusing on the rivalries among the Great Powers in the search for markets during the world depression of the 1930s, the author surveys the five Major Powers and all the Eastern European countries from the Baltic to Turkey. But he primarily canvases the economic situations in locations like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia.

"[This book] is the story of what happened in the United States between Pearl Harbor and V-J Day. For those ... who were in this country then, the book will be a trip down memory lane. For others, it will be pure history. For all, it will be a thorough re-creation of the events, sometimes ludicrous and sometimes tragic, and personalities that left their mark upon America during a period of transition and upheaval. V-girls and V-mail, Willow Run and Henry Kaiser, dollar-a-year men and C stickers, Sidney Hillman and Rosie the Riveter, Ernie Pyle and The Voice of the Turtle, Veronica Lake and 'Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree,' blackouts and the internment of the Japanese. These are but a few of the hundreds of phenomena of the American home front during World War II that Richard Lingeman has recaptured. Six years in the research and writing, the book exhibits as sharp an eye for small, revelatory details--civil defense measures in Wyoming, milk shortages in Texas, and one-armed outfielders--as for large and crucial subjects such as the response of industry to war and shifting population patterns that changed the face of the nation. While there is no doubt that [this book] is sheer reading pleasure (just look at the index for all you never knew or have forgotten to remember), there is equally little doubt that it is filled with insights and information that record permanent alterations in the American way of life. The war brought new, if still limited, opportunities to both the Negro and to women, and it is perhaps significant that in 1945 the two groups were thought to be worth almost exactly the same on the labor market. And if the war definitively ended the Depression, it was at the price of the military-industrial complex with which we live today. Thus the book simultaneously reveals the past and does much to explain the present. Ultimately, though, what emerges most clearly is a portrait of everyday life in America in a time of unprecedented national emergency. Predictably enough, there are heroes and villains, excesses and deprivations, valor and foolishness. Seldom has an era been so carefully and vividly brought back to life, and it is all here in a book that is destined to take its place beside Only Yesterday and The Aspirin Age as a classic of significant popular history."--Dust jacket.