The first book on the groundbreaking 1954 Western by director Nicholas Ray, controversial in its time, now celebrated as a groundbreaking example of high camp, LGBTQ themes, and the outer limits of the Hollywood system.What to make of Johnny Guitar, Nicholas Ray’s high-drama psychological Western from 1954? The film met with a mixed reception on its release but over the years has assumed cult status in some circles, with some critics now citing it among th...

**A pioneering work of Afrofuturism and antiracist fiction by the author of Black No More, about a Black scientist who masterminds a worldwide conspiracy to take back the African continent from imperial powers—for fans of the Oscar-nominated film American FictionA Penguin Classic**“An amazing serial story of Black genius against the world” is how Black Empire was promoted upon its original publication as a serial in The Pittsburgh Courier...

It is the 1930s and John P. Moore, an ambitious author, has just had his first story, a science fiction tale featuring the adventures of scientists and journalists taking the first trip to the planet Mars, published in Amazing Stories.But you won't find that story, along with its two sequels, inside the pages of any copy of Amazing Stories – not in a pulp magazine collector's vault, not on the internet archive and that is because the Amazing Stories that published ...

A deep dive into mid-century African American newspapers, exploring how Black pulp fiction reassembled genre formulas in the service of racial justiceIn recent years, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Marvel’s Black Panther, and HBO’s Watchmen have been lauded for the innovative ways they repurpose genre conventions to criticize white supremacy, celebrate Black resistance, and imagine a more racially just world—important progressive messages widely...

This article reads Willard Huntington Wright's work against his anxieties about cultural hierarchy and value, utilizing archival work in Wright's papers at the University of Virginia and unearthing a previously unknown series of crime stories that he published under another pseudonym a decade before his success as bestselling detective novelist S. S. Van Dine. The author argues that Wright's work in popular fiction provides a special opportunity for interrogating the highbrow/lowbrow divid...

From the hard-boiled detective stories of Dashiell Hammett to the novels of Claude McKay, The Word on the Streets examines a group of writers whose experimentation with the vernacular argues for a rethinking of American modernism—one that cuts across traditional boundaries of class, race, and ethnicity.The dawn of the modernist era witnessed a transformation of popular writing that demonstrated an experimental practice rooted in the language of the streets. Emerging alongs...

**A pioneering work of Afrofuturism and antiracist fiction by the author of Black No More, about a Black scientist who masterminds a worldwide conspiracy to take back the African continent from imperial powersA Penguin Classic**“An amazing serial story of Black genius against the world” is how Black Empire was promoted upon its original publication as a serial in The Pittsburgh Courier from 1936 to 1938. It tells the electrifying tale of Dr. Henry...

Mythologized as the era of the “good war” and the “Greatest Generation,” the 1940s are frequently understood as a more heroic, uncomplicated time in American history. Yet just below the surface, a sense of dread, alienation, and the haunting specter of radical evil permeated American art and literature. Writers returned home from World War II and gave form to their disorienting experiences of violence and cruelty. They probed the darkness that the war opened up and confronted bigotry, exis...

This Companion examines the full range and vigor of the American novel. From the American exceptionalism of James Fenimore Cooper to the apocalyptic post-Americanism of Cormac McCarthy, these newly commissioned essays from leading scholars and critics chronicle the major aesthetic innovations that have shaped the American novel over the past two centuries. The essays evaluate the work, life and legacy of influential American novelists including Melville, Twain, James, Wharton, Cather, Faul...

In America Noir David Cochran details how ten writers and filmmakers challenged the social pieties prevalent during the Cold War, such as the superiority of the American democracy, the benevolence of free enterprise, and the sanctity of the suburban family. Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone featured victims of vast, faceless, bureaucratic powers. Jim Thompson's noir thrillers, such as The Grifters, portrayed the ravages of capitalism on those at the bottom of the s...

Each generation revises literary history and this is nowhere more evident than in the post-Second World War period. This 2011 Companion offers a comprehensive, authoritative and accessible overview of the diversity of American fiction since the Second World War. Essays by nineteen distinguished scholars provide critical insights into the significant genres, historical contexts, cultural diversity and major authors during a period of enormous American global political and cultural power. Th...

Cinematic Flashes challenges popular notions of a uniform Hollywood style by disclosing uncanny networks of incongruities, coincidences, and contingencies at the margins of the cinematic frame. In an agile demonstration of "cinephiliac" historiography, Rashna Wadia Richards extracts intriguing film fragments from their seemingly ordinary narratives in order to explore what these unexpected moments reveal about the studio era. Inspired by Walter Benjamin's preference for studying cultural f...