New York In The Forties

Photographs aspects of New York life in the forties from the old Metropolitan Opera House to the Lower East Side shops and the boardwalk on Coney Island

The stormy decade which witnessed the end of World War II and the dropping of the first atomic bomb is remembered in word and picture from the files of the New York Times.

At the end of World War II New York City went through a period of transformation - loved ones were reunited and babies were born into a new era. African American soldiers who fought in the name of democracy demanded equal rights at home. Women left the factories and returned to the domestic front to raise children and cater to their husbands. Vivian Cherry charts this period with lively vignettes full of compassion and gritty street scenes exuding social conciousness.

Who among us cannot testify to the possibilities of the night? To the mysterious, shadowed intersections of music, smoke, money, alcohol, desire, and dream? The hours between dusk and dawn are when we are most urgently free, when high meets low, when tongues wag, when wallets loosen, when uptown, downtown, rich, poor, black, white, gay, straight, male, and female so often chance upon one another. Night is when we are more likely to carouse, fornicate, fall in love, murder, or ourselves fall prey. And if there is one place where the grandness, danger, and enchantment of night have been lived more than anywhere else -- lived in fact for over 350 years -- it is, of course, New York City. From glittering opulence to sordid violence, from sweetest romance to grinding lust, critic and historian Mark Caldwell chronicles, with both intimate detail and epic sweep, the story of New York nightlife from 1643 to the present, featuring the famous, the notorious, and the unknown who have long walked the city's streets and lived its history. New York Night ranges from the leafy forests at Manhattan's tip, where Indians and Europeans first met, to the candlelit taverns of old New Amsterdam, to the theaters, brothels, and saloon prizefights of the Civil War era, to the lavish entertainments of the Gilded Age, to the speakeasies and nightclubs of the century past, and even to the strip clubs and glamour restaurants of today. We see madams and boxers, murderers and drunks, soldiers, singers, layabouts, and thieves. We see the swaggering "Sporting Men,"the fearless slatterns, the socially prominent rakes, the chorus girls, the impresarios, the gangsters, the club hoppers, and the dead. We see none other than the great Charles Dickens himself taken to a tavern of outrageous repute and be so shocked by what he witnesses that he must be helped to the door. We see human beings making their nighttime bet with New York City. Some of these stories are tragic, some comic, but all paint a resilient metropolis of the night. In New York, uniquely among the world's great cities, the hours of darkness have always brought opposites together, with results both creative and violent. This is a book that is filled with intrigue, crime, sex, violence, music, dance, and the blur of neon-lit crowds along ribbons of pavement. Technology, too, figures in the drama, with such inventions as gas and electric light, photography, rapid transit, and the scratchy magic of radio appearing one by one to collaborate in a nocturnal world of inexhaustible variety and excitement. New York Night will delight history buffs, New Yorkers in love with their home, and anyone who wants to see how human nocturnal behavior has changed and not changed as the world's greatest city has come into being. New York Night is a spellbinding social history of the day's dark hours, when work ends, secrets reveal themselves, and the unimaginable becomes real.

The twelve classic comedy films examined within these pages are distinguished by an equal number of defining comic performances. Ranging from The Great Dictator (1940) to A Southern Yankee (1948), each film focuses on the most central theme of "clown comedy": Resilience, the encouragement or hope that one can survive the most daunting of life's dilemmas--even during the war-torn 1940s. And each film can be regarded as a microcosm of the antiheroic world of its central clown (or clowns). Among the performers represented are Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, Abbott and Costello, Jack Benny, Eddie Bracken, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, the Marx Brothers, Harold Lloyd and Red Skelton. This lavishly illustrated work includes an introduction by noted film critic and historian Anthony Slide.

Ninety-seven photographs accompanied by descriptive notes capture New York City life in the depression years.

In America in the Forties, Goldberg energetically argues that the decade of the 1940s was one of the most influential in American his­tory: a period marked by war, sacrifice, and profound social changes. With superb detail, Goldberg traces the entire decade from the first stirrings of war in a nation consumed by the Great Depression to the conflicts with Europe and Japan to the start of the Cold War and the dawn of the atomic age. Richly drawn portraits of the pe­riod's charismatic, brilliant, and often controversial leaders-Frank­lin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Harry Truman-demonstrate their immense importance in shaping the era and, in turn, the course of American government, politics, and society. Goldberg chronicles U.S. heroic accomplishments during World War II and the early Cold War, showing how these military and diplomatic achievements helped lay the foundation for the country's current role in economic and military affairs worldwide. Combining an engrossing narrative with intelligent analysis, America in the Forties enriches our understanding of that pivotal era.

The Decades of Modern American Drama series provides a comprehensive survey and study of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1930s to 2009 in eight volumes. Each volume equips readers with a detailed understanding of the context from which work emerged: an introduction considers life in the decade with a focus on domestic life and conditions, social changes, culture, media, technology, industry and political events; while a chapter on the theatre of the decade offers a wide-ranging and thorough survey of theatres, companies, dramatists, new movements and developments in response to the economic and political conditions of the day. The work of the four most prominent playwrights from the decade receives in-depth analysis and re-evaluation by a team of experts, together with commentary on their subsequent work and legacy. A final section brings together original documents such as interviews with the playwrights and with directors, drafts of play scenes, and other previously unpublished material. The major playwrights and their works to receive in-depth coverage in this volume include: * Eugene O'Neill: The Iceman Cometh (1946), A Moon for the Misbegotten (1947), Long Day's Journey Into Night (written 1941, produced 1956), and A Touch of the Poet (written 1942, produced 1958); * Tennessee Williams: The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Summer and Smoke (1948); * Arthur Miller: All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), and The Crucible (1953); * Thornton Wilder: Our Town (1938), The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and The Alcestiad (written 1940s).