The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War

In the long-awaited follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, The New Yorker’s Louis Menand offers the definitive intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years. 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 essayist Louis Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from 1945 to 1970 that shaped our era. How did elitism, formal sophistication, and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility devoted to individual authenticity, freewheeling experimentation, and loving the Beatles?With the urbanity and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt’s Manhattan salons, Merce Cunningham’s North Carolina dance workshop, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Pre