White Diaspora: The suburb and the twentieth-century American novel

White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel

Volumn , Issue , 2011, Pages 1-238

  Jurca, Catherine ^a  

^a NONE

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References (303)

1. Edith Wharton, "The Great American Novel," Yale Review 16 (July 1927), 653.
2. The book that put the study of American urban literature on the map is Blanche Gelfant, The American City Novel (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1954).
3. Recent book-length studies that attest to the vigor of urban literary criticism include Dana Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991);
4. Charles Scruggs, Sweet Home: Invisible Cities in the Afro-American Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993)
5. Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995)
6. Carlo Rotella, October Cities: The Redevelopment of American Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998)
7. William Sharpe, Unreal Cities: Urban Figuration in Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot, and Williams (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)
8. Hana Wirth-Nesher, City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
9. Richard Lehan, The City in Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998) analyze the tradition of urban writing in the United States and Europe.
10. Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922; rpt., New York: Signet, 1991), 16.
11. David Gates, Jernigan (New York: Vintage, 1992), 29.
12. Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 107;
13. Tamara K. Hareven, "The Home and the Family in Historical Perspective," in Mack, Home: A Place in theWorld, 238.
14. Mary Corbin Sies, "The City Transformed: Nature, Technology, and the Suburban Ideal, 1877-1917," Journal of Urban History 14 (November 1987), 83, 86.
15. Local studies such as Michael H. Ebner, Creating Chicago's North Shore: A Suburban History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)
16. Carol A. O'Connor, A Sort of Utopia: Scarsdale, 1891-1981 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983)
17. On the impact of transportation technologies, see also Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 87-124, 157-89.
18. Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (London: Verso, 1996), 140, 135, 148.
19. Christopher Lasch, Haven in a HeartlessWorld: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic, 1977)
20. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988)
21. See also Dolores Hayden, Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life (New York: Norton, 1984)
22. Clifford Edward Clark Jr., The American Family Home, 1800-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986)
23. Richard Wright, Native Son (1940; rpt., New York: Harper, 1966), 45.
24. See Nina Baym, Women's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and aboutWomen in America, 1820-1870 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978);
25. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
26. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906; rpt., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 172;
27. John Steinbeck, The Grapes ofWrath (1939; rpt., New York: Bantam, 1955), 79;
28. Pietro di Donato, Christ in Concrete (1939; rpt., New York: Signet, 1993);
29. Ann Petry, The Street (1946; rpt., New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1991).
30. Warren I. Susman, "'Personality' and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture," in Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 277.
31. Gary Cross, "The SuburbanWeekend: Perspectives on a Vanishing Twentieth-Century Dream," in Visions of Suburbia, ed. Roger Silverstone (London: Routledge, 1997), 119.
32. The Rodriguez citation is from the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, PBS, December 10, 1999.
33. Christopher P.Wilson, White Collar Fictions: Class and Social Representation in American Literature, 1885-1925 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 16, 17.
34. Review of Mildred Pierce, Time 38 (September 29, 1941), 93.
35. Harlan Paul Douglass, The Suburban Trend (1925; rpt., New York: Arno, 1970), 229;
36. Stilgoe, Borderlands, 285.
37. Wilson, White Collar Fictions, 21.
38. Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 196;
39. Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 78.
40. Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, ed. Ruth Frankenberg (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997);
41. Race and the Subject of Masculinities, ed. Harry Stecopoulos and Michael Uebel (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997).
42. David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (London: Verso, 1994), 13.
43. See also David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991);
44. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1997);
45. White Trash, ed. Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz (New York: Routledge, 1997).
46. On this point see Phil Cohen, "Subcultural Conflict and Working-Class Community," in Culture, Media, Language, ed. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lane, and Paul Willis (London: Unwin Hyman, 1980), 78-87.
47. Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, 123. Lott makes a related point in "White Like Me," 482.
48. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), xv.
49. David Savran, Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 4.
50. Homi Bhabha, "Postscript," in Silverstone, Visions of Suburbia, 300.
51. Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from "The Tempest" to "Tarzan" (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3-21. Page numbers are from Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (New York: Ballantine, 1963).
52. Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 55.
53. See Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 232-36, for a treatment of British "invasion-scare" stories as expressions of late-Victorian and Edwardian anxieties about the political and cultural ramifications of imperialism.
54. Adna Ferrin Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century (1899; rpt., Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963), 307.
55. "Urban Sterilization," Journal of Heredity 8 (June 1917), 269.
56. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 114.
57. Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 45.
58. Frances A. Walker, "Restriction of Immigration," Atlantic Monthly 77 (June 1896), 824.
59. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890; rpt., New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), 5, 6, 22-23, 14-15.
60. See Robert A. Woods, ed., The City Wilderness: A Settlement Study (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898), 33-57;
61. Albert Benedict Wolfe, The Lodging House Problem in Boston (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), 11-19;
62. Franklin Kline Fretz, The Furnished Room Problem in Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1910), 60-66;
63. S. B. Young, European Modes of Living, or The Question of Apartment Houses (French Flats) (New York: Putnam, 1881), 1.
64. J. P. Putnam, "The Apartment-House," American Architect and Building News 27 (January 4, 1890), 3, 5.
65. "Apartment Hotels in New York City," Architectural Record 13 (January 1903), 85.
66. Christine Terhune Herrick, "Their Experience in a Flat," Harper's Weekly (January 11, 1890), 30-1. The city is identified only as some place other than New York City, possibly to suggest the dangers of apartment life in urban areas generally and not simply in the most densely populated American city.
67. "Apartment Life," Independent 54 (January 2, 1902), 11.
68. William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890; rpt., New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 55.
69. Kaplan, Social Construction of American Realism, 12, 44.
70. Henry Blake Fuller, The Cliff-Dwellers (1893; rpt., Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg Press, 1968), 244.
71. Frank Norris, Vandover and the Brute (1914; rpt., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), 179. His first novel, Vandover was written between 1894 and 1895 but published posthumously.
72. Harlan Paul Douglass, The Suburban Trend (1925; rpt., New York: Arno, 1970), 312, 307, 308, 311.
73. "Suburban Cottages versus Flats," Independent 62 (March 28, 1907), 748, 749.
74. Richard Harding Davis, "Our Suburban Friends," Harper's 89 (June 1894), 156, 157, 156.
75. William Dean Howells, "Mrs. Johnson," in Suburban Sketches (1871; rpt., Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1985), 13, 12. The stories were first published in the Atlantic Monthly.
76. Henry Cuyler Bunner, "The Newcomers," in The Suburban Sage: Stray Notes and Comments on His Simple Life (1896; rpt., Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, 1969), 139. The stories were published originally in Puck.
77. Bunner, "The First of It," in Suburban Sage, 151, 147, 155.
78. Waldon Fawcett, "Suburban Life in America," Cosmopolitan 35 (July 1903), 309. Writers still made efforts, however, to combat the comic stereotypes.
79. See, for example, Francis E. Clark, "Why I Chose a Suburban Home," Suburban Life 4 (April 1907), 187-89.
80. "Park Hill," Craftsman 17 (February 1910), 575, 576.
81. Advertisement, Chicago Tribune, May 8, 1910, IX2.
82. Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910; rpt., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 56, 59.
83. Theodore Roosevelt, "The Strenuous Life" (1899), in The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (New York: Century, 1900), 8;
84. Daly v. Morgan (69 Maryland Reports 461), cited in The Government of Metropolitan Areas in the United States, ed. Paul Studenski (1930; rpt., New York: Arno, 1974), 76, emphasis in text.
85. Dallas Lore Sharp, "The Commuter and the 'Modern Conveniences,' " Atlantic 106 (October 1910), 557.
86. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, or, The Racial Basis of European History (New York: Scribner's, 1916), 79.
87. Ordinances and Resolutions of the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, 1910-1911 (Baltimore: King, 1911), 204.
88. Editorial, Roland Park Review, April 1911, 6.
89. Joy Wheeler Dow, American Renaissance: A Review of Domestic Architecture (New York: Comstock, 1904), 18.
90. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner's, 1925), 4, 107, 54.
91. David E. Tarn, "Co-operative Group Plannings," Architectural Record 34 (November 1913), 467-75.
92. Stilgoe, Borderlands, 223.
93. Olmsted Associates to Kirkland Land Company, 1906, Olmsted Associates Papers, no. 71, Library of Congress.
94. Francis H. Bulot, "Developing a Restricted Home Community," American City 15 (November 1916), 534.
95. Sage Foundation Homes Company, "Forest Hills Gardens," (New York, 1909), unpaginated. The "laboring man, whose wages are small" had to look elsewhere for housing outside the city.
96. Howells, "A Pedestrian Tour," in Suburban Sketches, 71.
97. See Lott, Love and Theft; and Michael Rogin, Black Face, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996).
98. James D. Hart, The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), 219-20.
99. Advertisement, Los Angeles Times, October 1, 1922, V14.
100. The clause was extracted from a 1926 property deed in Tarzana.
101. Advertisement, Los Angeles Times, October 1, 1922, V14.
102. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan and the Golden Lion (serialized 1922; rpt., New York: Ballantine, 1963), 111.
103. Why Tarzana Lots Are the Best Buy on Ventura Boulevard (Unpaginated pamphlet, 1920s).
104. Lewis to Carl Van Doren (1920), in Lewis, The Man from Main Street: Selected Essays and Other Writings, 1904-1950, ed. Harry E. Maule and Melville H. Cane (1953; rpt., New York: Pocket Books, 1963), 135.
105. Light, Quixotic Vision, 84.
106. Edith Wharton to Lewis, cited in R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (1975; rpt., New York: Fromm, 1985), 435.
107. Carl Van Doren described recent literary criticisms of small town provincialism in "The Revolt from the Village: 1920," Nation 113 (October 12, 1921), 407-12.
108. Wilson, White Collar Fictions, 236.
109. Lears, Fables of Abundance, 357, my emphasis.
110. Lewis, "Self-Portrait," in Man from Main Street, 45.
111. Littell, review of Babbitt, 152.
112. Van Wyck Brooks, "The Culture of Industrialism" (1917), rpt. in Van Wyck Brooks: The Early Years, ed. Claire Sprague (New York: Harper, 1968), 195;
113. Waldo Frank, Our America (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919), 23, 30.
114. Brooks, The Wine of the Puritans (1908), rpt. in Sprague, Van Wyck Brooks, 5, 6, 7.
115. See Casey Blake, "The Young Intellectuals and the Culture of Personality," American Literary History 1 (Fall 1989), 510-34.
116. Susan Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 105.
117. Harold Stearns, preface, Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty Americans, ed. Stearns (New York: Harcourt, 1922), vii.
118. Stearns, preface, iii, vii.
119. Janet Hutchison, "Building for Babbitt: The State and the Suburban Home Ideal," Journal of Policy History 9 (1997), 184-210;
120. Karen Dunn-Haley, "The House that Uncle Sam Built: The Political Culture of Federal Housing Policy, 1919-1932" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1995), 95. See also Dunn-Haley, chap. 4. Hutchison documents the considerable impact of the "Own Your Own Home" agenda on middle-class suburbs and on consumption.
121. Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), 83.
122. See also Walter Benn Michaels, "An American Tragedy or the Promise of American Life?" Representations 25 (Winter 1989), 71-98.
123. Stuart Chase and F. J. Schink, "Consumers inWonderland," New Republic 48 (September 1925), 14, 12.
124. See Leslie Feidler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion, 1960).
125. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973), 89, 136.
126. Wirth-Nesher, City Codes, 20.
127. Martha Banta, Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 192.
128. Lewis, "Adventures in Auto-bumming-The Great American Frying Pan," Saturday Evening Post 192 (January 3, 1920), 62.
129. On the paid vacation, see Daniel Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 106.
130. On automobile tourism and accommodations, see Warren Belasco, Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910-1945 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979).
131. See Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 174-81.
132. For a history of the CoveredWagon and other forms of motorized housing in the United States, see Michael Aaron Rockland, Homes on Wheels (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1980).
133. Wayne Franklin and Michael Steiner, introduction, Mapping American Culture, ed. Franklin and Steiner (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 4.
134. Lewis, Work of Art (New York: Doubleday, 1935), 451, 450, 452.
135. See, for example, "Exit Frontier Morality," New Republic 37 (January 2, 1924), 137-38;
136. Katherine Anthony, "The Family," in Stearns, Civilization in the United States, 319-36.
137. Steven Marcus, "Sinclair Lewis," in Representations: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 44;
138. Love, Babbitt: An American Life, 62.
139. Lewis, The Man from Main Street, 21, 22-23.
140. Christine Frederick, "Is Suburban Living a Delusion?" Outlook 148 (February 22, 1928), 240. On Frederick and domestic science, see n. 37.
141. Ethel Longworth Swift, "In Defense of Suburbia," Outlook 148 (April 4, 1928), 543.
142. Littell, review of Babbitt, 152;
143. Edmund Wilson, "Wanted-A City of the Spirit," 63.
144. Cited in Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life, 298.
145. May Sinclair, review of Babbitt, New York Times, September 23, 1922, sec. 3, p. 1.
146. Mumford, Sticks and Stones (1925; rpt., New York: Dover, 1955), 87-88.
147. Susman, "Culture and Civilization: The Nineteen-Twenties," in Culture as History, 116.
148. See Wright, Building the Dream, 240;
149. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 193. Jackson writes that "the victims were often middle-class families who were experiencing impoverishment for the first time" (193).
150. Lewis Corey, The Crisis of the Middle Class (1935; rpt., New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 230.
151. Alfred M. Bingham, Insurgent America: Revolt of the Middle-Classes (New York: Harper, 1935), 117.
152. Lewis, It Can't Happen Here (1935; rpt., New York: Signet, 1993), 83, 79.
153. On Lewis's recuperation of the middle class in the thirties, see James T. Jones's quirky and clever essay, "A Middle-Class Utopia: Lewis's It Can't Happen Here," in Sinclair Lewis at 100: Papers Presented at a Centennial Conference (St. Cloud, Minn.: St. Cloud University Press, 1985), 213-25.
154. Lewis, Kingsblood Royal (New York: Random House, 1947), 43.
155. E. Franklin Frazier, "La Bourgeoisie Noire," Modern Quarterly 5 (1928-30), 82.
156. See Norman Mailer, "The White Negro" (1957), rpt. in Advertisements for Myself (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 337-58.
157. James M. Cain, Mildred Pierce (1941; rpt., New York: Vintage, 1989), 3-4.
158. Bruce Bliven, "Los Angeles: The City That Is Bacchanalian-in a NiceWay," New Republic 51 (July 13, 1927), 198;
159. Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930 (1967; rpt., Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 144-45;
160. Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (1948; rpt., New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 41.
161. See Robert Schweitzer and Michael W. R. Davis, America's Favorite Homes: Mail-Order Catalogues as a Guide to Popular Early Twentieth-Century Houses (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990). On the impact of the machine as the organic basis for authentically American design in this period, see Orvell, The Real Thing, 157-97.
162. Phillip Smith, "Ready-Made Houses," Scientific American 153 (August 1935), 69.The "prefabrication movement" in housing during the Depression is discussed in Albert Bruce and Harold Sandbank, A History of Prefabrication (1943; rpt., New York: Arno, 1972).
163. "Machine for Living," Business Week (December 15, 1934), 8.
164. Editors of Fortune, Housing America (New York: Harcourt, 1932), 52;
165. Catherine Bauer, "Slums Aren't Necessary," American Mercury 31 (March 1934), 303.
166. John T. Flynn, "Be It Ever So Prefabricated," Colliers 96 (July 13, 1935), 13;
167. Mumford, "Mass Production and the Modern House," 18, 13, 16.
168. Mumford, "Mass Production and the Modern House" (Part Two), Architectural Record 67 (February 1930), 110.
169. Mumford, "The American Dwelling-House," American Mercury 19 (April 1930), 469. He spoke most often of the single-family house in these articles in recognition that it represented the American ideal of shelter.
170. Smith, "Ready-Made Houses," 69.
171. Karl Detzer, "Houses from the Factory," American Mercury 50 (August 1940), 434;
172. Carl Herter, "And These You Buy Ready Made," American Home 15 (March 1936), 18.
173. See also "The Ready-Made House Arrives," New Republic 82 (March 13, 1935), 117-19.
174. Cain, Double Indemnity (1935; rpt., New York: Vintage, 1989), 3-4.
175. See especially the house of the homosexual pornographer and blackmailer Arthur Geiger in Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939; rpt., New York: Vintage, 1988).
176. Cain, "Paradise" (1933), in 60 Years of Journalism, ed. Roy Hoopes (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1985), 167.
177. See Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the Model Home, 236.
178. See Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 217-51.
179. Karen Halttunen, "From Parlor to Living Room: Domestic Space, Interior Decoration, and the Culture of Personality," in Bronner, Consuming Visions, 158.
180. See also Katherine C. Grier, Culture and Comfort: People, Parlors, and Upholstery, 1850-1930 (Rochester, N.Y.: Strong Museum, 1988), 290-91.
181. Emily Post, "The Personality of a House," Ladies' Home Journal 46 (May 1929), 14. The articles were expanded and republished as The Personality of a House: The Blue Book of Home Design and Decoration (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1930) and reprinted into the 1940s.
182. Dorothy Dix, " 'Is Your Home Furnished as It Should Be?' " Better Homes and Gardens 9 (November 1930), 35.
183. Susman, " 'Personality' and Twentieth-Century Culture," in Culture as History, 277.
184. Ben Davis, "Individuality as the Decorator Sees It," California Arts and Architecture (March 1937), 19.
185. Post, "The Personality of a House," Ladies' Home Journal 46 (July 1929), 16.
186. Doris Suman, "Personality in the Small Home," California Arts and Architecture (July 1939), 17.
187. Isabel Hopkins, "Is There a Decorator in the House?" House and Garden 70 (October 1936), 58.
188. William Marling, The American Roman Noir: Hammett, Cain, and Chandler (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), ix. The analysis of Cain includes The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity but omits Mildred Pierce.
189. See Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life (New York: Harper, 1976), 24.
190. Loss of status, embodied here in the transition from housewife to waitress, was a particular source of anxiety for the middle-class during the Depression. See Glen H. Elder, Children of the Great Depression: Social Change in Life Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
191. Margaret Collins, "Career, Limited," Scribner's 102 (October 1937), 45.
192. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown in Transition (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937), 178.
193. Dorothy Sabin Butler, "Men against Women," Forum 94 (August 1935), 80, 82.
194. Charlotte Muret, "Marriage as a Career," Harper's 173 (August 1936), 253.
195. Paula Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 37.
196. Review of Mildred Pierce, Sacramento Bee (November 22, 1941), from the Mildred Pierce clippings file, James M. Cain papers, Library of Congress.
197. On domestic science literature, see chap. 2, n. 37.
198. Leonard Reaume, "Fine Points about Subdividing," Los Angeles Realtor (May 1929), 10.
199. A. K. Moore, "Subdividers to Sell Must Build," National Real Estate Journal (May 1929), 21-28, dates the first uses of model homes to 1921-22.
200. See David Laidler, Fabricating the Keynesian Revolution: Studies of the Inter-War Literature on Money, the Cycle, and Unemployment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. 206-12; 225-28, for an overview of American and British economists' opinions on underconsumption as an explanatory model of economic crisis.
201. Cited in Madden, Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, xx.
202. Bethany Ogden, "Hard-Boiled Ideology," Critical Quarterly 34 (Spring 1992), 75.
203. Edmund Wilson, The Boys in the Back Room: Notes on California Novelists (San Francisco: Colt Press, 1941), 11.
204. Harold Strauss, "A Six-Minute Egg," New York Times Book Review (February 18, 1937), 8.
205. The slogan comes from an advertisement for the novel that appeared in the New York Times Book Review (September 25, 1941), 23.
206. "Watching Jungle Gangsters Fight and Feast," Literary Digest 108 (March 7, 1931), 32.
207. On the making of Tarzan the Ape Man and Burroughs's response to the Weissmuller series, see Glenn Essoe, Tarzan of the Movies (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel, 1968). Page references to Native Son are from Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Harper, 1966).
208. St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945; rpt., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 12, 602.
209. Wright, "How Bigger Was Born" (1940), rpt. in Native Son, xvi.
210. See Cappetti, Writing Chicago, esp. chap. 9.
211. "Iron Ring in Housing," Crisis (July 1940), 205.
212. Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (1983; rpt., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 52.
213. Nelson Algren, "Remembering RichardWright," in Twentieth-Century Interpretations of "Native Son": A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 115.
214. Robert Bone describes a black literary Renaissance in Chicago of the thirties, anchored by Wright, that rivaled the significance of Harlem's in "Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance," Calaloo 9 (Fall-Winter 1986), 446-68.
215. Sidney H. Bremer, "Home in Harlem, New York: Lessons from the Harlem Renaissance Writers," PMLA 105 (January 1990), 47;
216. Alain Locke, "The New Negro," in The New Negro, ed. Locke (1925; rpt., New York: Atheneum, 1992), 4. See Scruggs, Sweet Home, 54-58.
217. Claude McKay, " 'Segregation' in Harlem?" Column Review (December 1941), 5.
218. Barbara Johnson, "The Re[a]d and the Black," in Richard Wright's "Native Son," ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 1988), 115.
219. See Wright, "Blueprint for Negro Writing," New Challenge 2 (Fall 1937), 53-65.
220. Ernest W. Burgess, "The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project," in Park, Burgess, and McKenzie, The City, 47-62.
221. Ernest W. Burgess, "Residential Segregation in American Cities," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 140 (November 1928), 105.
222. See also Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States, where he argues with Burgess that black housing patterns followed those of "other racial and cultural groups" (233).
223. Drake and Cayton calculated that by 1930, 75 percent of all residential property in the city was covered by legal agreements between property owners not to sell or rent to African Americans in white neighborhoods. "Iron Ring of Housing" estimated the number at 80 percent in 1940.
224. See also Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, esp. chap. 1.
225. Wright, "The Negro and Parkway Community House" (Chicago, 1941), unpaginated. Cayton was the community center's director. See also 12 Million Black Voices, 100-104.
226. Wright, American Hunger (1977; rpt., New York: Harper, 1983), 3;
227. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; rpt., New York: Vintage, 1989), 158.
228. Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 103.
229. On the "debilitating" "protection" of the color line's "invisible walls," see Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper, 1965), 19.
230. Wright, "How Jim Crow Feels," Negro Digest (January 1947), 53.
231. See Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of RichardWright, 2nd ed. (1973; rpt., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 275-76;
232. Constance Webb, Richard Wright: A Biography (New York: Putnam's, 1968), 239;
233. Gayle Addison, Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980), 175-76. The substance of the story is the same in all three accounts, although details vary.
234. See Wright, "I Choose Exile," undated essay, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
235. Fabre puts the house in Vermont, while "I Choose Exile" locates it in Connecticut, a state that suggests a more immediate commuting distance to New York.
236. Conversations with James Baldwin, ed. Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1989), 15.
237. Cited in Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 241.
238. Ruth Moore, "New Kind of Urban Living Will Appear in Hyde Park," Chicago Sun-Times, January 27, 1957;
239. Dale Pontins, letter to the editor, Chicago Daily News, March 22, 1958, both Hyde Park clippings file, CHS.
240. Keith Wheeler, Peaceable Lane (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 126.
241. Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955), 3.
242. William H. Whyte Jr., "The Transients," Fortune 47 (May 1953), 113, first ellipses mine. Unless otherwise noted, further quotations of Whyte are from The Organization Man (New York: Anchor, 1957).
243. Nelson Algren, Men in Boots (1935; rpt., New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1987), 103.
244. C. Wright Mills, White Collar, 74.
245. Joel Foreman, introduction, The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons, ed. Foreman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 1. See also the essays in Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Cold War, ed. Lary May (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
246. Review, Time 66 (July 18, 1955), 102;
247. review, New York Times, July 17, 1955, sec. 7, p. 18;
248. Gerald Weales, review, Commonweal 62 (August 26, 1955), 525. The average reader to whom Weales refers is of Collier's, where the novel was serialized.
249. Gerald Weales, review, 526.
250. Quotation from book jacket.
251. Richard Ohmann, Politics of Letters (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 82, 83. Ohmann focuses upon novels written between 1960 and 1975.
252. Robert Moses, "Build and Be Damned," Atlantic Monthly 186 (December 1950), 41.
253. William Zeckendorf, "Cities versus Suburbs," Atlantic Monthly 190 (July 1952), 24;
254. William Laas, "The Suburbs Are Strangling the City," New York Times Magazine (June 18, 1950), 22.
255. Edgar Hanford, "Surprised in the Suburbs," American Mercury 81 (September 1955), 70.
256. J. P. Marquand, Sincerely, WillisWayde (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955), 444.
257. See Joel Pfister, "On Conceptualizing the Cultural History of Emotional and Psychological Life in America," in Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America, ed. Pfister and Nancy Schnog (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 17-59.
258. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963; rpt., New York: Dell, 1984), 15.
259. Jack Finney, The Body-Snatchers (1955; rpt., Boston: Gregg Press, 1976), 105.
260. Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road (1961; rpt., New York: Vintage, 1989), 20.
261. Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945; rpt., New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1986), 49.
262. Geoffrey Gorer, The Americans: A Study in National Character (1948; rpt., London: Cresset Press, 1955), 104, 105.
263. See, for example, the largely skeptical essays in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957);
264. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1988).
265. The census data are discussed in Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, and Jackson, "America's Rush to Suburbia," op-ed, New York Times, June 9, 1996, sec. 1, p.
266. Frederick Barthelme, Two against One (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988);
267. Joyce Carol Oates, Expensive People (1968; rpt., New York: Bookof-the-Month Club, 1992).
268. See also Rick Moody, Garden State (1992; rpt., Boston: Little, Brown, 1997);
269. Moody, The Ice Storm (New York:Warner, 1995);
270. Moody, Purple America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997).
271. Richard Locke, review of Couples and Rabbit Redux, New York Times Book Review, November 14, 1971, 2.
272. Janet Burroway, review of Purple America, New York Times Book Review, April 27, 1997, 7;
273. Gary Williams, review of Purple America, Rocky Mountain News, cited in Purple America.
274. See also James Kaplan, Two Guys from Verona (New York: Grove, 1998);
275. David Gates, Preston Falls (New York: Vintage, 1998).
276. John Updike, Rabbit, Run (1960; rpt., New York: Fawcett Crest, 1991), 20.
277. Updike, Rabbit Redux (New York: Knopf, 1971), 223.
278. Updike, Rabbit at Rest (New York: Knopf, 1990), 32, 173.
279. Updike, Rabbit Is Rich (1981; rpt., New York: Ballantine, 1996), 339.
280. Kenneth Crawford, "Middle-Class Revolt," Newsweek 72 (November 18, 1968), 52.
281. See also "The Forgotten?" Nation 207 (September 23, 1968), 259-60.
282. See, for example, "Squeeze on America's Middle Class," U.S. News and World Report 77 (October 14, 1974), 42-44;
283. "The Squeeze on the Middle Class," Business Week (March 10, 1975), 52-60.
284. Barbara Ehrenreich, "Is the Middle Class Doomed?" New York Times Magazine (September 7, 1986), 44.
285. See also Robert Kuttner, "The Declining Middle," Atlantic Monthly 252 (July 1983), 60-64;
286. George J. Church, "Are You Better Off?" Time 132 (October 10, 1988), 28-30;
287. Mark Levinson, "Living on the Edge," Newsweek 118 (November 4, 1991), 22-25;
288. Jack Beatty, "Who Speaks for the Middle Class?" Atlantic Monthly 273 (May 1994), 65-66;
289. Jolie Solomon, "Are You Anxious? You're Not Alone," Newsweek 125 (January 30, 1995), 42;
290. John Cassidy, "Who Killed the Middle Class?" New Yorker 71 (October 16, 1995), 113-14;
291. Andrew Hacker, "Meet the Median Family," Time 147 (January 29, 1996), 41-43.
292. See, for example, Katherine S. Newman, Declining Fortunes: The Withering of the American Dream (New York: Basic, 1993);
293. Wallace C. Peterson, Silent Depression: The Fate of the American Dream (New York: Norton, 1994).
294. David Gates, Jernigan (New York: Vintage, 1992), 29.
295. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965); rpt. in The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy, ed. Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), 76.
296. Peter Wyden, "Suburbia's Coddled Kids," Saturday Evening Post 233 (October 8, 1960), 44;
297. John Keats, "Compulsive Suburbia," Atlantic Monthly 205 (April 1960), 47.
298. Richard E. Gordon, Katherine K. Gordon, and Max Gunther, The Split-Level Trap (New York: Bernard Geis, 1960), 7.
299. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Constance Garnett (1877; rpt., New York: Modern Library, 1993), 3.
300. Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus (1959; rpt., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 94.
301. Gloria Naylor, Linden Hills (New York: Penguin, 1985), back cover.
302. Richard Ford, The Sportswriter (1986; rpt., New York: Vintage, 1995), 3.
303. See also Ford, Independence Day (New York: Vintage, 1996).