THE FREE WORLD
Art and Thought in the Cold War
With Pulitzer Prize Winning Scholar and Critic Louis Menand
The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was a contest of ideas: economic, political, artistic, and personal. 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.  Menand shows how the changing economic, technological, and social forces from the end of  World War II to Vietnam changed American culture forever.

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