The Immediate Experience

Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture

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by Robert Warshow,

Introduction by Lionel Trilling,

Preface by Stanley Cavell

Harvard University Press

Due/Published October 2001, 320 pages, paper

ISBN 0674007263

Available again. (F01)

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, Warshow wrote analyses of the folklore of modern life that have been compared to 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 Miller's The Crucible, and the Rosenberg letters--are classics, once frequently anthologized but now hard to find. Along with a new preface by Stanley Cavell, this volume includes several essays not previously published in the book--on Kafka and Hemingway--as well as Warshow's side of an exchange with Irving Howe.

"A legendary little book, partly because its author died at the age of 37, but mostly because it stands as a virtually unique representative from its period of a consistently open-minded, moral, aesthetic, and political engagement with commercial culture."--Louis Menand