The cultural front: the laboring of American culture in the Twentieth Century By Michael Denning

The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (The Haymarket Series)

Amazon.com Review

The Popular Front, a momentous groundswell of social activism during the Great Depression, was marked by activism among creative artists of all types that called attention to both the ends and the means of the production of art. Later historians would dismiss the socialist and communist elements of this cultural movement as minor sidelines of little if any significance. But, writes historian Michael Denning, "just as the radical movements of abolition, utopian socialism, and women's rights sparked the antebellum American Renaissance, so the communisms of the depression triggered a deep and lasting transformation of American modernism and mass culture, what I will call the laboring of American culture."

Although the early portions of the book, which establish the historical and social contexts of the Popular Front, are interesting, readers may likely find most fascinating the later chapters on some of the artists who took part in the movement, including Billie Holiday, who first began singing "Strange Fruit" at a left-wing cabaret, Duke Ellington, and John Dos Passos. His essay on the antifascist crusading of Orson Welles--"the American Brecht, the single most important Popular Front artist in theater, radio, and film"--is particularly insightful. Like Ann Douglas's Terrible Honesty, The Cultural Front is a panoramic history that brings vibrancy and passion to the telling of American culture. --Ron Hogan

From Library Journal

The American Thirties was a period of fertile political coalitions that drew largely from grass-roots labor and Civil Rights activism to give New Deal liberalism its left-wing content and orientation. Denning (American studies, Yale) is ostensibly concerned here with an examination of the cultural counterpart to that American popular front. The breadth of his study is stunning, ranging from the compositional innovations of Duke Ellington and blues popularizations of Josh White to the Marxist critical theorizing of Kenneth Burke, from Orson Welles's Shakespeare adaptations to Tillie Olson's feminist-labor stories. But this is not a work of popular history in any sense; it is a model of currents in cultural studies. Denning has produced a work that will sit alongside Warren Susman's Culture as History (Pantheon, 1985) as the deepest contemplation of Depression-era popular (and high) culture. For scholars and cultural studies enthusiasts.?Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., Pa.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 594 pages
• Publisher: Verso (July 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1859841708
• ISBN-13: 978-1859841709