When Grave Years Fueled Grand Art

(NYTimes) - ... “Dancing in the Dark” is an extended meditation on what Mr. Dickstein calls “the crucial role that culture can play in times of national trial.” In the ’30s it was a decidedly dual role. “The crisis kindled America’s social imagination,” he notes, “firing enormous interest in how ordinary people lived, how they suffered, interacted, took pleasure in one another, and endured.”
At the same time, audiences fled toward escapist entertainment. About the decade’s split personality, Mr. Dickstein asks: “How can one era have produced both Woody Guthrie and Rudy Vallee, both the Rockettes high-stepping at the Radio City Music Hall and the Okies on their desperate trek?” Continued

Photo: WPA (Library of Congress)