The Disunited States

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Vladimir Pozner, the influential French novelist, screenwriter, pioneer in literary genre and Oscar nominee, came to the United States in the 1930's. He found the nation and its people in a state of profound material and spiritual crisis, and took it upon himself to chronicle the life of the worker, the striker, the politician, the starlet, the gangster, the everyman; to document the bitter, violent racism tearing its society apart, the overwhelming despair permeating everyday life and the unyielding human struggle against it all.

Reviews

"In 1936, Pozner travelled to the United States and wrote about what he found. The result is this brimming book of reportage, a cross between Studs Terkel and the New Journalism written years before either came around." The New Yorker

"By dint of names, dates, and figures, of classified ads, of sundry facts, of statistics, of the confessions of great writers and of anonymous passersby, of quotations from small-town newspapers and from official discourses, Vladimir Pozner reconstructs, vibrantly, so terribly vibrantly and magnificently, the American civilization." Les Lettres Franaises

"1936 was a hell of a year. James Agee living with cotton tenant farmers in Alabama for what became Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Louis Adamic toiling away on his epic,My America. John Dos Passos publishing Big Money, the last in his American trilogy series. And Vladimir Pozner working on The Disunited States. Pozner is a missing link in this body of vital literary documentation centered around that most amazing year in American history. But The Disunited States is not about a year or a nation frozen in time. It speaks to us today." Dale Maharidge, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning And Their Children After Them.

"The book's style and structure are prescient, displaying an artistic sensibility that would not emerge as a movement until New Journalism appeared in the '60s and '70s. By transforming interviews into narrative form, interspersing third-party texts throughout his own, and endowing his subjects' words with a poetic resonance, Pozner not only provides a compelling historical snapshot, but also a visceral and moving reading experience." Patrick Glennon, Truthout

"Translated into English for the first time, this outsiders lyrical and perceptive portrait of America in the 1930s is an unearthed treasure. Pozner, a French novelist and screenwriter, captures the essence of a nation of contradictions at a moment of economic and spiritual crisis uncannily reminiscent of our times. Much of the book including the extraordinary tour-de-force that is the first chapter is drawn from local newspaper accounts. At times, the distance between our lives and those Pozner describes seems to dissolve, and were suddenly face to face with real human beings whose hopes and heartbreaks are strangely close to us." Plough

Author Bio

VLADIMIR POZNER (1905-1992) was a French writer whose prestigious career as a novelist took off in the 1930s with Tolsto est mort (Tolstoy is Dead) and Le mors aux dents (The Bit Between the Teeth). A militant antifascist who took refuge in the United States during the war, Pozner was also a Hollywood screenwriter, where he got to know Bertolt Brecht and Charlie Chaplin, and was nominated for an Oscar for The Dark Mirror. Backpacker, raconteur, and pioneer of literary styles, Pozner dedicated his life to giving a testimony of his times. ALISON L. STRAYER is a Canadian writer and translator. Her work has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Literature (for Jardin et prairie, a novel, 2000) and for Translation (Mavis Gallant's A Fairly Good Time, with G. Letarte, 2010), the Grand Prix Littraire de la Ville de Montral and the Prix France-Quebec. She lives in Paris.