The Immediate Experience: Movies Comics Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture

About this book

This collection of essays which originally appeared as a book in 1962 is virtually the complete works of an editor of Commentary magazine who died at age 37 in 1955. Long before the rise of Cultural Studies as an academic pursuit in the pages of the best literary magazines of the day Robert Warshow wrote analyses of the folklore of modern life that were as sensitive and penetrating as the writings of James Agee George Orwell and Walter Benjamin. Some of these essays-notably "The Westerner" "The Gangster as Tragic Hero" and the pieces on the New Yorker Mad Magazine Arthur Millers The Crucible and the Rosenberg letters-are classics once frequently anthologized but now hard to find. Along with a new preface by Stanley Cavell The Immediate Experience includes several essays not previously published in the book-on Kafka and Hemingway-as well as Warshows side of an exchange with Irving Howe. (20020111)