The Brazen Age ─ New York City and the American Empire: Politics, Art, and Bohemia

A sweeping history of the extraordinarily rich culture and turbulent politics that defined New York City in the mid-twentieth-century and ensured its place on the world stage.

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt visited New York City in 1944 during his fourth election tour, a raging storm failed to stop him from embarking on an ambitious fifty-mile automobile procession through Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan. He saw little of what was then a dynamic metropolis on the rise. This would be, as David Reid reveals, the architecture, a thriving movie business, theater, radio, and the beginning of television, as well as publishing—books, magazines, and newspapers. Looming large is the frenzied, creative energy of Greenwich Village, with its literary refugees from Europe, radicals and intellectuals producing important works and publishing small journals. But the times would be determined by the next president, and Reid looks closely at Thomas Dewey, Henry Wallace, and Harry Truman, as well as James Forrestal, secretary of the navy under Roosevelt, who would become the secretary of defense under Truman. A vivid and colorful moment in history, full of rich and unexpected detail.

DAVID REID is editor of Sex, Death and God in L.A. and West of the West: Imagining California (with Leonard Michaels and Raquel Scherr). His essays, articles, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Vanity Fair, The Paris Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times Book Review, and in various anthologies, including Pushcart Prize. He lives in Berkeley, California.