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The 50s

The Story of a Decade

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
This engrossing anthology assembles classic New Yorker pieces from a complex era enshrined in the popular imagination as the decade of poodle skirts and Cold War paranoia—featuring contributions from Philip Roth, John Updike, Nadine Gordimer, and Adrienne Rich, along with fresh analysis of the 1950s by some of today’s finest writers.
 
The New Yorker was there in real time, chronicling the tensions and innovations that lay beneath the era’s placid surface. In this thrilling volume, classic works of reportage, criticism, and fiction are complemented by new contributions from the magazine’s present all-star lineup of writers. The magazine’s commitment to overseas reporting flourished in the 1950s, leading to important dispatches from East Berlin, the Gaza Strip, and Cuba during the rise of Castro. Closer to home, the fight to break barriers and establish a new American identity led to both illuminating coverage, as in a portrait of Thurgood Marshall at an NAACP meeting in Atlanta, and trenchant commentary, as in E. B. White’s blistering critique of Senator Joe McCarthy. The arts scene is recalled in critical writing rarely reprinted, including Wolcott Gibbs on My Fair Lady, Anthony West on Invisible Man, and Philip Hamburger on Candid Camera. Also featured are great early works from Philip Roth and Nadine Gordimer, as well as startling poems by Theodore Roethke and Anne Sexton, among others. Completing the panoply are insightful and entertaining new pieces by present-day New Yorker contributors examining the 1950s through contemporary eyes. The result is a vital portrait of American culture as only one magazine in the world could do it.
Including contributions by Elizabeth Bishop • Truman Capote • John Cheever • Roald Dahl • Janet Flanner • Nadine Gordimer • A. J. Liebling • Dwight Macdonald • Joseph Mitchell • Marianne Moore • Vladimir Nabokov • Sylvia Plath • V. S. Pritchett • Adrienne Rich • Lillian Ross • Philip Roth • Anne Sexton • James Thurber • John Updike • Eudora Welty • E. B. White • Edmund Wilson
 
And featuring new perspectives by Jonathan Franzen • Malcolm Gladwell • Adam Gopnik • Elizabeth Kolbert • Jill Lepore • Rebecca Mead • Paul Muldoon • Evan Osnos • David Remnick
Praise for The 50s
 
“Superb: a gift that keeps on giving.”Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[A] magnificent anthology.”Literary Review
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    • Kirkus

      Starred review from August 1, 2015
      Following on the previous anthology, The 40s (2014), the editors of the New Yorker continue to mine the magazine's impossibly rich history. With the possible exception of Esquire, there has been no general-interest magazine in the history of American journalism more influential, and more packed with talent, than the New Yorker. It's arguable when the magazine's heyday took place, but many knowledgeable readers place it in the tenure of William Shawn, "quiet, subtle, secretive, elliptical, and, to some, quite strange," who succeeded Harold Ross in January 1952 and set to work building his own legacy. This volume contains work by writers who are still influential today-and some who have been all but forgotten. Joseph Mitchell, interest in whom has recently revived, turns up early, in a section called "American Scenes," reporting from the front lines of the postwar civil rights movement. Dwight McDonald, little known today, turns in a fine portrait of the activist Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Workers, who-the sexist and ageist past being what it is-is described as looking "like an elderly schoolteacher or librarian." In a similar vein, profiling the emerging movie star Marlon Brando in 1957 at a length unthinkable today, Truman Capote sets off with the odd observation, "Most Japanese girls giggle." As he shows, Brando sometimes gave them reason to. The portrait is every bit as serious, though, as Lillian Ross' reportage on the making of the now-classic John Huston film The Red Badge of Courage (1951). Other highlights: a forward-looking piece by Roald Dahl anticipating the wine craze of later decades and a deeply curious short story by John Updike describing in passing the antics of a party-going woman who, "insanely drunk, was throwing herself around as if wanting to break a bone." Other contributors include A.J. Liebling, James Thurber, Wolcott Gibbs, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, and Nadine Gordimer. Superb: a gift that keeps on giving and a fine introduction to the life and letters of a supposedly (but not really) gray decade.

      COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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  • English

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