Abstract
The Age of Anxiety. This was the title of W.H. Auden’s Pulitzer Prizewinning long poem of 1947, in which four representative characters gather to talk, love and dream in a New York bar during World War II. Auden clearly caught a post-war mood, and the phrase ‘age of anxiety’ soon became proverbial, seeping into all levels of American culture over the next few years. The young composer Leonard Bernstein read The Age of Anxiety in the summer of 1947, and felt an ‘extreme personal identification of myself with the poem’, which signified for him ‘the record of our difficult and problematic search for faith’ in the modern world. His second symphony, composed in 1948–9, is his own record of his engagement with the poem’s themes and ideas; he called this symphony The Age of Anxiety.1
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Notes
Leonard Bernstein, ‘Essay on The Age of Anxiety’ (1949). For an account of Bernstein’s composition of The Age of Anxiety.
Humphrey Burton, Leonard Bernstein, (London, Faber and Faber, 1994.), p. 335.
For the classic account of Modernism’s exclusivist programme, see John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses; Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992).
William March, The Bad Seed (New York: Harper Collins, 1953; 1997), p. 30.
William H. Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War Two (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 111–17.
James Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 311.
Sylvia Post, ‘Babies Equal Boom’, New York Post, May 4, 1951.
Sacvan Bercovitch, The Cambridge History of American Literature (London: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 24.
Jonathan Michel, Prozac on the Couch (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 72.
Norman Mailer, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster”, Advertisments for Myself, (London: Flamingo, 1961; 1994), p. 291.
Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (London: Virago, 1998), p. 129.
Stephen King, Danse Macabre, (London, Warner 1981) p. 23.
James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 63.
John Springhall. Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangsta-Rap, 1830–1996 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998).
See Guy Oakes, The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Kim Newman, Millennium Movies: A Critical Guide to Contemporary Horror Films (Prospect, KY: Harmony, 1999) p. 66.
For ‘integrated’ intellectuals, see Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 137–70.
E.P. Thompson, ‘Outside the Whale’, in Out of Apathy (London: New Left Books, 1960), pp. 177, 193.
David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945–51 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007).
Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles (London: Abacus, 2006).
Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1968).
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© 2011 Darryl Jones, Elizabeth McCarthy and Bernice M. Murphy
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Jones, D., McCarthy, E., Murphy, B.M. (2011). Introduction. In: Jones, D., McCarthy, E., Murphy, B.M. (eds) It Came From the 1950s!. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337237_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337237_1
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