The epithet “phony” was omnipresent during the postwar period in the United States. It was an easy appellation for individuals who appeared cynically to conform to codes of behavior for social approbation or advancement. Yet Holly Golightly “isn’t a phony because she’s a real phony,” says her agent in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In exploring this remark, Abigail Cheever examines the ways in which social influence was thought to deform individuals in midcentury American cultur...

The 1970s has often been hailed as a great moment for American film, as a generation of “New Hollywood” directors like Scorsese, Coppola, and Altman offered idiosyncratic visions of what movies could be. Yet the auteurist discourse hailing these directors as the sole authors of their films has obscured the important creative roles women played in the 1970s American film industry.Women and New Hollywood revises our understanding of this important era in American film by exa...