New Era - (American Thought and Culture) by Paul V Murphy (Paperback)

About the Book

The New Era examines American thought and culture in the 1920s through the eyes of a generation of American intellectuals who became tribunes of openness, experimentation, and tolerance. The book tracks the emergence of a new set of arguments and debates-over women's roles, s...

Book Synopsis

The New Era examines American thought and culture in the 1920s through the eyes of a generation of American intellectuals who became tribunes of openness, experimentation, and tolerance. The book tracks the emergence of a new set of arguments and debates--over women's roles, sex, mass culture, the national character, ethnic identity, race, democracy, religion, and values--that would define American public life for the next fifty years.

Review Quotes

A deft and often surprising reconsideration of a decade we thought we knew. Murphy's insights hold obvious implications for our own time.

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.

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 Crane's ambition to reconcile poetic form and technological power, and Mary Parker Follett's 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 decade's end, the quest for a common fund of values, ideas, and symbols--a unified culture of modernity--had emerged as the defining feature of the intellectual vocation and the most important legacy of the twenties for what followed.

About the Author

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