This book charts the Hollywood studio system's genesis, international dominance, and self-understood demise by way of its influences on modernist literature in the United States. It shows how the American film industry's business practices and social conditions inflected the form of some of the greatest works of prose fiction and non-fiction.

Classical Hollywood, American Modernism charts the entwined trajectories of the Hollywood studio system and literary modernism in the United States. By examining the various ways Hollywood's industry practices inflected the imaginations of authors, filmmakers, and studios, Jordan Brower offers a new understanding of twentieth-century American and ultimately world media culture. Synthesizing archival research with innovative theoretical approaches, this book tells the story of the studio system's genesis, international dominance, decline, and continued symbolic relevance during the American postwar era through the literature it influenced. It examines the American film industry's business practices and social conditions, demonstrating how concepts like anticipated adaptation, corporate authorship, systemic development, and global distribution inflected the form of some of the greatest works of prose fiction and nonfiction by modernist writers, such as Anita Loos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Patsy Ruth Miller, Nathanael West, Parker Tyler, Malcolm Lowry, and James Baldwin.

Reconstructs how Ray became a "rebel auteur" in cinema culture.

Features a history of the Hollywood community and its wartime films. Seeing Hollywood as a forcefield, the author examines the social networks, working relationships, and political activities of artists, intellectuals, and film workers who flocked to Hollywood from Europe and the eastern United States before and during the second world war.

First Published in 2012. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Current accounts of American experimental filmmaking typically begin after World War II. This is largely due to the fact that rather than refer to interwar cinematic experiments in the United States as "avant-garde"-a term that even then carried an intellectually creative connotation-nearly all independent productions were unceremoniously labeled "amateur" or "non-professional." This dissertation exposes a group of individuals who actively challenged and continue to defy either label. This group is comprised by Americans who were well schooled in the language and reasoning of European modernism and who were often considered artists in other media. We thus are missing a full conception of the space homegrown experimental film practices occupied in American modernism. After all, the 1930s witnessed both the concretization of Hollywood's classical style and a canonization of avant-garde art with the opening of the Museum of Modern Art. It is my claim that these forgotten film artists played a pivotal role throughout these years so crucial for present day art history and cinema studies. The alternative I propose considers these individuals as nothing short of American modernists working at a time that lacked the vocabulary to describe them as such.