Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (Revised)

David Hajdu

ISBN 10: 0374187673 / ISBN 13: 9780374187675

Published by Farrar Straus Giroux March 2008, 2008

About this Item

Signed with gift inscription by author on title page. Light edgewear to DJ. Small stain on front paste down and free endpaper.

Seller Inventory # 1051259

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (Revised)
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux March 2008
• Publication Date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374187673
• ISBN 13: 9780374187675
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Printing: First Edition
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Signed: Signed By Author
• Seller catalogs:
  • American History - 18th Century

About this title

Synopsis

In the years between World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium, American popular culture as we know it was first created--in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. No sooner had this new culture emerged than it was beaten down by church groups, community bluestockings, and a McCarthyish Congress--only to resurface with a crooked smile on its face in Mad magazine.

The story of the rise and fall of those comic books has never been fully told--until The Ten-Cent Plague. David Hajdu's remarkable new book vividly opens up the lost world of comic books, its creativity, irreverence, and suspicion of authority.

When we picture the 1950s, we hear the sound of early rock and roll. The Ten-Cent Plague shows how--years before music--comics brought on a clash between children and their parents, between prewar and postwar standards. Created by outsiders from the tenements, garish, shameless, and often shocking, comics spoke to young people and provided the guardians of mainstream culture with a big target. Parents, teachers, and complicit kids burned comics in public bonfires. Cities passed laws to outlaw comics. Congress took action with televised hearings that nearly destroyed the careers of hundreds of artists and writers.

The Ten-Cent Plague radically revises common notions of popular culture, the generation gap, and the divide between "high" and "low" art. As he did with the lives of Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington (in Lush Life) and Bob Dylan and his circle (in Positively 4th Street), Hajdu brings a place, a time, and a milieu unforgettably back to life.

About the Author

David Hajdu is the author of Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn and Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina. He is the music critic for The New Republic, and he teaches at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.