A World Remembered

Bernard Smith here recounts a personal memoir and radical interpretation of the tumultuous quarter-century which shaped present-day America.

Radical newspaper editor, featured book reviewer, essayist, book editor, book author, motion picture executive, and film producer-Smith occupied positions throughout the period which made him a broad range of influential acquaintances and which enabled him to observe and experience the literary and political worlds about which he writes.

From the 1920s which saw numbers of Americans turning against the provincial and bigoted pieties of society, a literary and intellectual flowering of extraordinary vigor, and an economic boom and spectacular market crash; to the 1930s Depression, the beginnings of a welfare state, the Spanish Civil War, and the rise of Hitler and Stalin; to the 1940s and the Second World War, the success of the Red Army in China, the ascent of the United States to a mountain of wealth and power, and the burgeoning of the cold war; to the early 1950s, the Korean War, and the scourge of McCarthyism-Bernard Smith was there, listening. analyzing, writing.

Smith’s cast of characters is astonishing: H.L. Mencken, Alfred A. Knopf,

Malcolm Cowley, Michael Gold, John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph McCarthy, and

Harry S. Truman are just some of the people who appear in these pages.

For anyone interested in that distant yet influential period of American history. this is a unique and valuable memoir.