Overview

Shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2022 Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction 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 stresses the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian scepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by 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, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt’s Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and the post-war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism. He also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and thought, revealing how America’s once neglected culture became respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book offers a masterly account of the main characters and minor figures who played part in shaping the post-war world of art and thought.

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9780007126880

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Reviews

'The Free World sparkles. Fully original, beautifully written' New York Times 'Like a great novelist, he creates a world' Fintan O'Toole, The New York Review of Books 'Elegantly written, entertaining and bursting with information . . . [Menand] has undertaken what few writers of intellectual history would dare to do' Marjorie Perloff, TLS 'The Free World is a finely balanced book: not a history of culture as a reflection of cold war ideology, but a history of the culture that happened all around it. A starry cast of characters - from George Orwell and John Lennon to Betty Friedan and Malcolm X, Hannah Arendt and Jack Kerouac - bring personality to one of the most fascinating periods in western culture whose ideas of freedom are still felt profoundly today' Alex von Tunzelmann, Financial Times 'The Free World is an engrossing and often revelatory book, a capacious, ambitious, and wonderfully crafted synthesis of intellectual and cultural histor' Jack Hamilton, Slate 'Menand is a genial hand-holder and amazingly good company' Leo Robinson, Prospect 'Masterful, and exhibits such brilliant writing and exhaustive research . . . I learned so much' Mark Greif, The Atlantic 'An engrossing and impossibly wide-ranging project . . . In The Free World, every seat is a good one' Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post

'The Free World sparkles. Fully original, beautifully written' New York Times 'Like a great novelist, he creates a world' Fintan O'Toole, The New York Review of Books 'Elegantly written, entertaining and bursting with information . . . [Menand] has undertaken what few writers of intellectual history would dare to do' Marjorie Perloff, The Times Literary Supplement 'What Louis Menand has done in this magnificent book is to honour and embody the multifarious ideas of freedom that defined the post-war West's conception of itself. And if that sounds too hifalutin', well, Menand is also a dab hand at laugh-out-loud one-liners. Enjoy' Christopher Bray, The Tablet '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 'A dazzling panorama of the Cold War but also a captivating case study in Menand's great subject: how art and ideas matter in the world. A thinking person's page-turner' Martin Puchner, author of The Written World and The Language of Thieves

‘The Free World sparkles. Fully original, beautifully written’ New York Times ‘Like a great novelist, he creates a world’ Fintan O’Toole, The New York Review of Books ‘Elegantly written, entertaining and bursting with information . . . [Menand] has undertaken what few writers of intellectual history would dare to do’ Marjorie Perloff, TLS ’The Free World is a finely balanced book: not a history of culture as a reflection of cold war ideology, but a history of the culture that happened all around it. A starry cast of characters – from George Orwell and John Lennon to Betty Friedan and Malcolm X, Hannah Arendt and Jack Kerouac – bring personality to one of the most fascinating periods in western culture whose ideas of freedom are still felt profoundly today’ Alex von Tunzelmann, Financial Times ‘The Free World is an engrossing and often revelatory book, a capacious, ambitious, and wonderfully crafted synthesis of intellectual and cultural histor’ Jack Hamilton, Slate ‘Menand is a genial hand-holder and amazingly good company’ Leo Robinson, Prospect ‘Masterful, and exhibits such brilliant writing and exhaustive research . . . I learned so much’ Mark Greif, The Atlantic ‘An engrossing and impossibly wide-ranging project . . . In The Free World, every seat is a good one’ Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post

Author Information

Louis Menand is a professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, a staff writer at The New Yorker, and has been a contributing editor of The New York Review of Books since 1994. This is his first book for a general readership.

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