Morris Dickstein is one of the foremost cultural historians in the United States; the notoriously cranky Norman Mailer called him "one of our best and most distinguished critics of American literature." A former editor of The Partisan Review, Dickstein was one of the founding members of the National Book Critics Circle, which gives out the National Book Awards, among the most prestigious literary prizes in the U.S. His latest book Dancing in the Dark (W. W. Norton, 2009)--an ambitious, sprawling cultural history of the Great Depression-- debunks the long-held myth that Depression entertainments were pure escapism. It also--rather controversially--makes a case for government intervention in the arts.

The past is not always prologue, but it sure gets your attention at times. Morris Dickstein’s Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression appeared just after the spectre of total global financial collapse had passed—though even with stimulus and bailout, and all the band-aids in the world, it’s clear that we are in for a long period of brutally reduced expectations.

Dancing in the Dark is a book best read slowly, perhaps with a DVD player or YouTube close at hand, so that when Dickstein invokes Fred Astaire's "refusal to dance, and the very dance in which he acts this out" in Swing Time, you can see exactly what he means. Yet among its many delights, the pleasure of watching the author, a student of Trilling's in the late 1950s and a longtime contributor to Partisan Review, kick over his own traces is far from trivial. This is not Dickstein's first crack at filial rebellion.

Dickstein makes compelling sense of a bewildering decade’s art and expression for an America much further removed from that time than the current economic uncertainties would suggest (there are no bread lines, at least not yet). In the process, he reveals those essential elements of Depression-era culture—a passion to chronicle the hardest of knocks, speak truth to power seen and unseen, and keep dancing anyway—that have continued to play out in our art these last 70-odd years, and counting.

Dancing in the Dark by Morris Dickstein—in the pit of our own Great Recession, it’s fascinating to see what diverted and amused America while life was at its darkest. Dickstein’s stunning survey of the cultural triumphs of the Great Depression teaches us that even the worst of times sometimes produces the best work.

Hands down, the best book I read all year was Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression by CUNY professor Morris Dickstein. This fresh take on literature, film, photography and music exhibits Dickstein’s mastery of the Depression era’s cultural lodestones.

But Dickstein's most intriguing claim is that we shouldn't look for the depression solely in documentary projects such as these: it touched culture at every level, and in a surprisingly exuberant variety of forms. The economic crisis may have turned America's soul in on itself, but it also fed popular fantasies of escape, even signalling a reordering of society along more egalitarian lines. If we picture a depression-era movie we tend to think of John Ford's muted adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath; we forget that, six months earlier, Hollywood had produced The Wizard of Oz, in which catastrophe on the prairies initiates Dorothy's fantastical journey of self-discovery along the Yellow Brick Road.

STITCHES by David Small. An award-winning children’s book illustrator revisits his childhood and how he sought escape from its bleakness in fantasy. DANCING IN THE DARK: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION by Morris Dickstein. The author captures America’s literary, artistic, musical and cinematic high points from the 1929 crash to World War II. DAWN LIGHT by Diane Ackerman. Reflections on human interconnectedness with nature and how forgetting this imperils the planet.

The list includes Daniyal Mueenuddin, Linda Gordon, and Morris Dickstein,

Obviously by not collapsing everything into a narrow thesis Dickstein can explore and critique a wider expanse of Depression-era cultural production. But he’s rarely able to find the crucial connecting threads linking the “intangible” public mood of the day and its “concrete” artistic achievements. The book does, however, follow through on its promise to deal with what Dickstein sees as a dichotomy unique to the Depression: “a culture rich in the production of popular fantasy and trenchant social criticism.” But the author attempts to juggle too many disparate subjects, genres, and themes to make enough meaningful connections between the era’s cultural innovations and its dismal social reality.

An exhaustive and invigorating overview of the films, songs, books, plays, buildings and design that emerged from America’s darkest economic decade, “Dancing in the Dark” reminds us that cultural production and consumption is complicated business. The dark brings its own elements of yearning and wonderment; the light comes with shades of gray. Melancholy mingles with hope. As the song that gives the book its title suggests, we dance in the dark to “brighten up the night.”

Dickstein has zeroed in on a bountiful time period, but his painstaking opus arrives with little more than a disappointing thud

Morris Dickstein achieves something so remarkable with "Dancing in the Dark" that it hovers close to the miraculous: He almost makes you wish you'd been living in America during the 1930s.

Dickstein’s book has much to recommend it. His erudite commentary on the novels and films of the 1930’s will command well-earned respect among literary and cinema scholars. But a feel for the popular culture of the 1930’s is almost totally lacking in Dancing in the Dark. This is more a “sin of omission,” than an error in fact or interpretation. Dickstein is too skillful an historian for that. But it is a serious fault all the same.

A high-minded cultural history of the 1930s, when sentimental populism could coexist with polished modernism.

Perfectly timed with the zeitgeist, Morris Dickstein’s Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression has been drawing promient reviews. Intriguingly, the book argues that those culturally fertile times were stimulated by two conflicting desires: for the blunt truth about the country’s economic circumstances, and for the desire to escape from it.

Morris Dickstein achieves something so remarkable with "Dancing in the Dark" that it hovers close to the miraculous: He almost makes you wish you'd been living in America during the 1930s.

Morris Dickstein's new cultural history of the Great Depression, called Dancing in the Dark, is one of those "everything but the kitchen sink" kind of books — except in this case the kitchen sink does make an oblique appearance, given that Dickstein discusses art deco industrial design, as well as the dance extravaganzas of Busby Berkeley; the novels of Zora Neale Hurston, Henry Roth and, of course, John Steinbeck; gangster movies and screwball comedies; the music of Bing Crosby; and the photography of Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke-White. (From Fresh Air, Air Date: 9/22/09)

Morris Dickstein served two terms on the NBCC board during the 1980s. His book “Gates of Eden” was nominated for the NBCC award in criticism in 1978. His “Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression,” has just been published by W. W. Norton.

Mr. Dickstein remains a serious and perceptive critic, however, adept at observations both macro (“Epic scenes from the Dust Bowl are part of our permanent shorthand for rural poverty and natural desolation”) and micro.

An excerpt from "Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression" by Morris Dickstein

A smart, ambitious piece of work, the product of prodigious research and careful thought, and those who read it will come away with a clearer understanding of an important but widely misunderstood period in the country's cultural life.

Morris Dickstein's "Dancing in the Dark" is not exactly the syncretic "Cultural History of the Great Depression" that its subtitle promises -- at best, the book treats inferentially the broad political and social trends of that desperate, crucial era. Let me quickly add, the book is something better than that: a collection of thoughtfully linked essays on relatively few but exemplary works and their creators -- novels, poems, plays, movies, art (both high and decorative) and music (both popular and classical) that defined the period between the Crash of 1929 and America's entrance into World War II. These admirably written pieces are marked by a generosity of spirit that never deteriorates into the quarrelsome or the niggardly, even when Dickstein does not fully endorse the objects he's discussing.

“Dancing in the Dark’’ is not encyclopedic. It cannot, and does not, include every last memorable artifact of the era, and some may be alarmed by the absence of Gary Cooper, or Count Basie, or Raymond Hood. Dickstein, however, is exhaustive without being exhausting, and his book is a commendable compression of a complex decade.

As Morris Dickstein writes in “Dancing in the Dark” (Norton; $29.95), a bighearted, rambling new survey of American culture in the nineteen-thirties, “The arts bound people together in a collaborative effort to interpret and alleviate their plight.” They were something to turn to when faith in work seemed lost.

From grim proletarian novels to over-the-top screwball comedies, this examination of 1930s culture high and low provides a comprehensive look at the heartbeat of an era still felt today.

Morris Dickstein’s Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression is a sweeping, stirring, disturbing, and more than occasionally thrilling account of a period unsettlingly like our own.

An excerpt from Morris Dickstein's "Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression", which will be published on Sept. 14, 2009.

The arts can be a lifeline as well as a pleasant diversion, a source of optimism and energy as well as peerless insight, especially when so many people are stymied or perplexed by the unexpected changes in their world. As our troubles worsen, as stress morphs into anxiety and depression, we may desperately need the mixture of the real and the fantastic, the sober and the silly, that only the arts can bring us.

Morris Dickstein spent 29 years on Dancing in the Dark, his new book about the movies, books, theater and music that came out of the Great Depression.

A fascinating portrait of a distant era that still speaks compellingly to our own. (subscription required)

There was more to the 1930s than Dorothea Lange photos and John Steinbeck novels. NEH-funded scholar and critic Morris Dickstein talks with Humanities about the decade’s rival clichés and hidden gems. His newest book, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, will be released by W. W. Norton & Company in September.