You didn’t pick up an Oscar this year at the Academy Awards? Well, with Hollywood films in mind, here’s a book you’ll want to pick up: Working-Class Hollywood by Steven J. Ross. In addition, it’s this week’s book giveaway on Facebook.

Liberal and radical films declined in the 1920s as an emerging Hollywood studio system, pressured by censors and Wall Street investors, pushed American film in increasingly conservative directions. Appealing to people’s dreams of luxury and upward mobility, studios produced lavish fantasy films that shifted popular attention away from the problems of the workplace and toward the pleasures of the new consumer society. While worker filmmakers were trying to heighten class consciousness, Hollywood producers were suggesting that class no longer mattered. Working-Class Hollywood shows how silent films helped shape the modern belief that we are a classless nation.

“Steve Ross has written an absorbing and important book about a time when working-class life and working-class filmmakers occupied a central place in American cinema. I strongly recommend that anyone interested in the politics of American film read this book.”–Michael Moore, Director of Roger and Me and TV Nation

Anyone who LIKES us on Facebook is automatically entered in our weekly draws. This Friday at 3:30 p.m. EST, check out our facebook page to find out, “And the winner is….”

Working-Class Hollywood by Steven J. Ross

Wystan Hugh Auden, had he lived an exceptionally long life, would have been 104 today. He died at the young age of 67 in 1973, leaving an ardent band of young poet followers – and the entire literary canon – bereft. To celebrate Auden’s 104th year, Princeton University Press has three new books out to mark the occasion; among them Aidan Wasley’s THE AGE OF AUDEN: Postwar Poetry and the American Scene. Though Auden was English, it is his overlooked American years that were so formative for U.S. poets like Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and John Ashbery.

Below you’ll find a teaser from a 1997 interview Wasley had with the esteemed Ashbery, Auden devotee and Titan of postwar poetry. Enjoy!

Q: Do you recall your first meeting with Auden?

John Ashbery: I first met him when he gave a reading at Harvard, I think in the spring of ’47, perhaps. A friend of mine, who was also a poet, George Montgomery—he was a student who was a little older than I was, having been in the war and come back—had a party for Eliot and I met Auden there and chatted with him. All I can remember talking about was asking him whether he liked living in England better than living in America. He said he preferred America, though he preferred the English countryside because it was much tidier looking… And then I remember running into him about a year later at a lunch counter somewhere in Harvard Square and I reintroduced myself. I think at that time I was writing my Senior Paper on him. After I moved to New York, I think I met him maybe a year or so after that at the apartment of John Bernard Myers and then I sort of lost sight of him again. Then when I got to know James Schuyler I would occasionally go over to Auden’s apartment to see Chester [Kallman] because Schuyler and Chester were good friends… I was always a bit intimidated by him, as I think many people were.

Q: Are there any Auden poems that are touchstone poems for you?

JA: Well, I love The Orators and Paid on Both Sides. I can remember first lines: “Consider this and in our time.” Those ballads “Victor” and “Miss Gee” got me interested in rhythms of popular songs and ballads. “Taller to-day,” “Spain,” “Paysage Moralisé,” “A Bride in the 30’s.” In fact, I just wrote a cento that uses “Lay your sleeping head…” (“The Dong with the Luminous Nose,” Wakefulness, 1998). “As I Walked Out One Evening” was one of my favorites. Was “Musée des Beaux Arts” in that little book from Four Weddings and A Funeral? Because that was used in the movie “The Man Who Fell to Earth.” That’s a terrific movie actually, and that poem, as it’s used in the movie, is really worth watching… . “Canzone,” I liked. I always liked the line, “The mouse you banished yesterday / Is an enraged rhinoceros today.” I’ve had a lot of experience with students like that. And then The Age of Anxiety came out when I was fully launched into Auden’s poetry and I liked that. And I always liked his Anglo-Saxon moments.

–New York City, May 1997 – courtesy of Aidan Wasley

For more interesting commentary on Auden, check out Wasley’s 2007 essays for Slate’s Auden Centennial and of course, don’t miss THE AGE OF AUDEN: Postwar Poetry and the American Scene.

FACT: The Harlem riot of 1935 not only signaled the end of the Harlem Renaissance; it made black America’s cultural capital an icon for the challenges of American modernity.

Harlem Crossroads:
Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century
By Sara Blair

Luring photographers interested in socially conscious, journalistic, and aesthetic representation, post-Renaissance Harlem helped give rise to America’s full-blown image culture and its definitive genre, documentary. The images made there in turn became critical to the work of black writers seeking to reinvent literary forms. Harlem Crossroads examines their deep, sustained engagements with photographic practices. Arguing for Harlem as a crossroads between writers and the image, Sara Blair explores its power for canonical writers, whose work was profoundly responsive to the changing meanings and uses of photographs.

Read the introduction online at:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i8510.html

For more books in our sale catalog, please visit:
http://press.princeton.edu/booksale/

Writing in the Soapbox column of Publishers Weekly this week, Andrei Codrescu makes a new case for the elusive and exclusive author. He argues that Facebook and other social networking sites are ” giving away stupid prose for free!” and that familiarity doesn’t necessarily breed book sales.

He writes, “not only do you not sell books by being friendly, you won’t sell any because everyone in your ‘social network’ thinks they know you. Why buy your books, since you’ll tell them everything they want to know for free.”

So, what do you think? Is Facebook the marketing mecca we have been promised? Or are publishers and authors actually cannibalizing their sales by providing too much access to what we are selling?

The responses on Twitter are worth perusing for their range of support to disbelief.

We have now published two books with Andrei and have a third on the way. If you are a fan, check out his books The Poetry Lesson and The Posthuman Dada Guide. His next book Whatever Gets You through the Night will publish this June.

From a Swedish hotel made of ice to the enigma of UFOs, from a tragedy on Lake Minnetonka to the gold mine of cyberpornography, The Princeton Reader brings together more than 90 favorite essays by 75 distinguished writers. This collection of nonfiction pieces by journalists who have held the Ferris/McGraw/Robbins professorships at Princeton University offers a feast of ideas, emotions, and experiences–political and personal, light-hearted and comic, serious and controversial–for anyone to dip into, contemplate, and enjoy.

The volume includes a plethora of topics from the environment, terrorism, education, sports, politics, and music to profiles of memorable figures and riveting stories of survival. These important essays reflect the high-quality work found in today’s major newspapers, magazines, broadcast media, and websites.

The book’s contributors include such outstanding writers as:

• Ken Armstrong of the Seattle Times
• Jill Abramson, Jim Dwyer, and Walt Bogdanich of the New York Times
• Evan Thomas of Newsweek
• Joel Achenbach and Marc Fisher of the Washington Post
• Nancy Gibbs of Time
• Jane Mayer, John McPhee, Alex Ross and John Seabrook of the New Yorker
• Alexander Wolff, senior writer at Sports Illustrated
• Michael Dobbs, formerly of Washington Post, now a Cold War historian and author
• Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times‘ Beijing Bureau Chief
• James V. Grimaldi, Washington Post, Pulitzer prize-winner
• Roberta Oster Sachs, formerly ABC, CBS, and NBC news and Emmy Award winner, now University of Richmond School of Law
• Joel Stein, columnist and a regular contributor to Time
• Claudia Roth Pierpont, staff writer at New Yorker
• Greil Marcus, music and culture critic, author, has been a columnist for the New York Times, The Believer

For a complete listing, visit:
http://press.princeton.edu/TOCs/c9322.html

The perfect collection for anyone who enjoys compelling narratives, The Princeton Reader contains a depth and breadth of nonfiction that will inspire, provoke, and endure.

John McPhee’s many books include Annals of the Former World, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. Carol Rigolot is executive director of the Humanities Council at Princeton University.

We invite you to read chapter one online:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9322.pdf

The Princeton Reader:
Contemporary Essays by Writers and Journalists at Princeton University
Edited by John McPhee & Carol Rigolot

This photograph was taken at the mid-November launch for Lawrence P. Jackson’s new book, The Indignant Generation. Thank you to the New York Institute of Humanities for playing host and assembling a wonderful audience. We can’t imagine a better place or time to launch this new project. To view a video of Jackson describing the meticulous research he conducted while writing the book, please visit this web site.

Shown in the picture, left to right, are Mark Greif, Darryl Pinckney, Lawrence Jackson, and Rhoda Levine.

This was taped earlier this morning. Edwidge will also be on Leonard Lopate this afternoon.

Edwidge Danticat will be interviewed on Tavis Smiley this Friday evening. I hope you have a chance to tune in to hear her discuss her new book Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work.

Last Friday, I posted a picture of two gentlemen and asked readers to identify the person holding a copy of The Indignant Generation. As promised, I am revealing the answer here: Lawrence P. Jackson is shown speaking to David Wilson who is the President of Morgan State University, a school both of Jackson’s parents attended in the 1950s.

Speaking before a luncheon crowd of 100 at Morgan State University’s Student Center, Baltimore native Jackson impressed the crowd with a history lesson, a Morgan State University history lesson. Jackson, Professor of English and African American Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, spoke for an hour about the impactful careers of Morgan English teachers Nick Aaron Ford and Waters Turpin. Jackson cataloged the travails and triumphs of each men’s careers during the era of segregation. The lecture began with a shocking account of the violence black professors faced during the 1940s. Ford and Turpin both resisted the oppressive system. Jackson claimed that Dr. Ford, who served Morgan from 1946 through the 1970s, possessed a “black critical independent spirit.” Novelist Waters Turpin grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and published important works in the second half of the 1930s. Jackson suggested that Turpin’s obscurity today was due to his artistic vision which was too elegant for the Marxists and too militant for the assimilationists.

The lecture was drawn from Jackson’s new book The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960. The 600 page literary and cultural history is being published by Princeton University Press in mid-November. The audience included Morgan’s new president David Wilson, the school’s provost T. Joan Robinson, and the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts Burnie Hollis Jr. Agnes Edwards, a Morgan graduate and former student of both Drs. Ford and Turpin, said, “I didn’t know any of that, but I am glad that I do now.” When asked which portions of the new research he would use, Dean Hollis, another former student and friend of both men, smiled broadly and said, “All of it!”

**This text taken from Emory University’s event press release.

The file name might give you a hint, but make your guess known below in the comments for this post. I’ll reveal the identity of this reader and the location and purpose of the event on Monday.

While researching his biography of Ralph Ellison, Lawrence P. Jackson found a huge gap in African American literature–a gap in how it is studied and taught. Students of American literature are taught about the Harlem Renaissance, but what existed between this period and the later writers of the Civil Rights Period? Who were the writers of the in between years? Why haven’t they been studied as a cohesive group? With The Indignant Generation, Jackson finally gives voice to this generation of writers and their staunch supporters.

Emory University has recorded two podcasts with Jackson — one in which he discusses his new book The Indignant Generation, and the other in which he reads from the book. Click over to give them a listen.

Congratulations to Margot Canaday, whose book, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America, has won the 2010 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize!

This award, given by the American Studies Association (ASA), honors the best-published first book in American Studies that highlights the intersections of race with gender, class, sexuality, and/or nation. According to the ASA website, it is named after Lora Romero, a “valued and long-active member of the American Studies Association, former Assistant Professor at Stanford University, and author of Home Fronts: Nineteenth Century Domesticity and Its Critics.”

The prize consists of a lifetime membership in the ASA, and will be awarded at a ceremony during the ASA convention in November, 2010.

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