And We Can Face the Music Together

"'Dancing in the Dark' is old-school cultural history, with a whiff of Matthew Arnold and the best that has been thought and said. Well before he gets to Woody Guthrie, Dickstein signals with his title a keen interest in popular song (he’s a big fan of Bing Crosby’s recording of Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz’s ballad). He also looks at photographs and design and mentions dance and painting. But his principal focus is on books and movies, and his bias is in favor of high art. 'I made no effort to cover everything,' he writes in his preface; he chose instead to concentrate on 'unusually complex, enduring works.' That’s good news for those of us who welcome any reminder of the glories of ’30s literature and film. When Dickstein sends us back to Faulkner’s 'As I Lay Dying' or Fitzgerald’s 'Tender Is the Night' or 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,' that extraordinary, unclassifiable collaboration between James Agee and Walker Evans, when he prompts us to listen again to the sly screwball banter of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in 'Bringing Up Baby,' we can only thank him."

Adam Begley in The New York Times reviews Morris Dickstein's Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression.