Braziller | 1970 | Pdf | Eng | 344 pag | ISBN10 0807605719 |

Examines the postwar breakdown of traditional genteel society and the emergence of the American mass culture

First World War ended an epoch of sweetness and light, wrote H. L. Mencken, and middle-class readers applauded his attack on their old middleclass myths. The war had destroyed the official culture which waged and supported it—"smashed it like an aged and brittle shell," as Robert Sklar says in his introduction to the present book—and freed the creative life so long contained within.

"It was an astonishing moment, a moment when a cultural order that had dominated American life since the eighteenth century lost its hold on the minds of its adherents—lost its force at the very time it was reaching out to legalize previously informal control over culture. The Twenties was likely the first, and perhaps the only, decade in American culture that lacked an obvious cultural center. This was one of the sources of its enormous cultural diversity and vitality, as many forms—the remnants of genteel culture, a middle-class split into business, rural, scientific, and other cultural fragments, a literary culture, nationality and race cultures, and the new mass culture—danced the game of musical chairs for survival, and possibly for dominance."