The New Era: American Thought and Culture in the 1920s

(Paperback)

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In the 1920s, Americans talked of their times as modern, which is to say, fundamentally different, in pace and texture, from what went beforea new era. With the end of World War I, an array of dizzying inventions and trends pushed American society from the Victorian era into modernity. The New Era provides a history of American thought and culture in the 1920s through the eyes of American intellectuals determined to move beyond an older role as gatekeepers of cultural respectability and become tribunes of openness, experimentation, and tolerance instead. Recognizing the gap between themselves and the mainstream public, younger critics alternated between expressions of disgust at American conformity and optimistic pronouncements of cultural reconstruction. The book tracks the emergence of a new generation of intellectuals who made culture the essential terrain of social and political action and who framed a new set of arguments and debatesover womens roles, sex, mass culture, the national character, ethnic identity, race, democracy, religion, and valuesthat would define American public life for fifty years.

Reviews

Murphy has laced a fresh, wide-ranging synthesis with probing portraits of individuals in a way that will prove useful to students and scholars alike. -- Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester
The New Era takes as its point of departure the insights of William Ogburn and Van Wyck Brooks into the tension between culture and social experience in the early years of the twentieth century. Intellectuals and artists made that tension the object of their own creative work, Paul Murphy explains, and offered new syntheses intended to overcome it. The exploration of hybrid ethnic identities by novelists Nella Larsen and Jean Toomer and sociologist Robert Park, Hart Cranes ambition to reconcile poetic form and technological power, and Mary Parker Folletts attempt to integrate the individual and the group in a new pluralist politics are among the many intriguing episodes in his wide-ranging survey of the period. By the decades end, the quest for a common fund of values, ideas, and symbolsa unified culture of modernityhad emerged as the defining feature of the intellectual vocation and the most important legacy of the twenties for what followed. -- Casey Nelson Blake, Columbia University
A deft and often surprising reconsideration of a decade we thought we knew. Murphy's insights holdobvious implications for our own time. -- Gregory Sumner, author of Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut's Life and Novels

Author Bio

Paul V. Murphy is associate professor of history at Grand Valley State University.