Overview

In the years between World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium, American popular culture as we know it was first created in the bold, pulpy pages of comic books. The Ten-Cent Plague explores this cultural emergence and its fierce backlash while challenging common notions of the divide between ""high"" and ""low"" art. David Hajdu reveals how comics, years before the rock-and-roll revolution, brought on a clash between postwar children and their prewar parents. Created by outsiders from the tenements, garish, shameless, and often shocking, comics became the targets of a raging generational culture divide. They were burned in public bonfires, outlawed in certain cities, and nearly destroyed by a series of televised Congressional hearings. Yet their creativity, irreverence, and suspicion of authority would have a lasting influence.

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9781433210303

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Reviews

""The Ten-Cent Plague is about the best account yet of comics in America, an instant classic of cultural history."" -- ""Geoffrey O'Brien, editor, Library of America"" ""A compelling story of the pride, prejudice, and paranoia that marred the reception of mass entertainment in the first half of the century."" -- ""Times Literary Supplement (London) "" ""A vivid and engaging book."" -- ""New Yorker"" ""David Hajdu, who perfectly detailed the Dylan-era Greenwhich Village scene in Positively 4th Street, does the same for the birth and near death (McCarthyism!) of comic books in The Ten-Cent Plague."" -- ""GQ"" ""Hajdu creates a colorful, character-driven story of our first real--and lasting--counterculture and shows why we embrace it still."" -- ""Amazon.com"" ""Incisive and entertaining...This book tells an amazing story, with thrills and chills more extreme than the workings of a comic book's imagination."" -- ""New York Times"" ""Marvelous...A staggeringly well-reported account of the men and women who created the comic book, and the backlash of the 1950s that nearly destroyed it...Hajdu's important book dramatizes an early, long-forgotten skirmish in the culture wars that, half a century later, continues to roil."" -- ""Entertainment Weekly (Grade: A-) "" ""Rudnicki's steely narration of the Great Comic Book Scare of 1953-54 will raise the hackles of any freethinking American...The book is outstanding, even for those who don't love comic books. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award."" -- ""AudioFile"" ""Sharp...lively...entertaining and erudite...David Hajdu offers captivating insights into America's early bluestocking-versus-blue-collar culture wars, and the later tensions between wary parents and the first generation of kids with buying power to mold mass entertainment."" -- ""Village Voice"" ""The main attraction--EC Comics publisher Bill Gaines's attempt to explain in a Senate committee hearing how an illustration of a man holding a severed head could be in good taste--holds all the dramatic power it has acquired as it's been told among fans over the past half-century."" -- ""Publishers Weekly (starred review)"" ""To those who think rock 'n' roll created the postwar generation gap, David Hajdu says: Think again. Every page of The Ten-Cent Plague evinces [Hajdu's] zest for the 'aesthetic lawlessness' of comic books and his sympathetic respect for the people who made them."" -- ""Chicago Tribune""

Author Information

David Hajdu is the author of Lush Life and Positively 4th Street. He lives in Manhattan and writes for the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, New Republic, and New York Review of Books. Stefan Rudnicki is a Grammy-winning audiobook producer and a multiaward-winning narrator, named one of AudioFile's Golden Voices.

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