Louis Menand — The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War
When:
Thursday, Apr 29, 2021 7:00p -
8:00p
Thursday, Apr 29, 2021 7:00p -
8:00p
Where:
Online event
Admission:
FREE
Categories:
Art, History, Lectures & Conferences, Virtual & Streaming
Event website:
https://bpl.bibliocommons.com/events/6053831c8bba992f00c16fa2
Harvard Book Store joins the Boston Public Library in welcoming Louis Menand—the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University and author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club—for a discussion of his latest, highly anticipated book, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. He will be joined in conversation by our president David Leonard. This program is part of our Repairing America Series.
People who are interested in attending are kindly asked to register at the following link: https://www.harvard.com/event/virtual_event_louis_menand/.
About The Free World
The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense—economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar and critic Louis Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind.
How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt’s Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage’s residencies at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg’s friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin’s transformation into a Civil Right spokesman, Susan Sontag’s challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood.
Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America’s once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened.
“Louis Menand’s The Free World is at once an astonishing work of history and criticism and an essential road map to the middle decades of the twentieth century, from Sartre, Trilling, and Mailer to Sontag, Rauschenberg, and Baldwin. Every page is bracing; the whole amounts to an epic. In a landmark study of a time when art and ideas mattered, Menand’s very act of interpretation, the book itself, shows why they still do.” —Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States
Louis Menand is Lee Simpkins Family Professor of Arts and Sciences and Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University. He is the author of several books, including The Marketplace of Ideas (2010) and The Metaphysical Club, which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in History. He is also a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker.
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Harvard Book Store’s award-winning event series continues online! Named "Best of Boston: 2020 Best Virtual Author Series" by Boston magazine.
The Repairing America Initiative is the Boston Public Library's pledge to focus its 2021 programming and services on bridging the gaps that divide America. By prioritizing economic recovery, civic engagement, COVID-19 recovery, racial equity, workforce development, and youth engagement, the BPL is working to help Americans rise above the challenges they face.
