A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian offers a brilliant biographical study of George Seldes, one of America's leading champions of American popular culture in the 1920s and 1930s, and traces the amazing growth of popular culture, from silent films and talkies to radio and jazz to the coming of television.

This book is about the American Arts scene in the early 1920s. Seldes devotes a chapter to each of the arts. These are motion pictures; music; US. theater; dance; journalism; circus and American Wit and Humour. Several prominent practitioners of the time are discussed.

A lively and stimulating invitation to debate the value of art offers a provocative study that will pique the interest of and inspire any reader who loves painting, music, or literature.