Podcast summary
In the years between World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium, American popular culture was first created in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. Join us for a discussion of the lost world of comic books, their creativity, irreverence, and suspicion of authority.
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Participant(s) Bio
David Hajdu is the music critic for The New Republic and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has written for The American Scholar, The Atlantic Monthly, BookForum, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New Times Book Review, Vanity Fair, and other publications. Hajdu is the author of three books: Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (1996), Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña, and The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America (2008). His first two books were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and both books won the ASCAP Deems-Taylor Award. His books have also been finalists for the LAMBDA Literary Award and the Firecracker Book Award.
Ben Schwartz has written on cartooning for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, LA Weekly, Comic Art, and is currently on assignment for Vanity Fair. He blogs for the Huffington Post, The New York Times' "Laugh Lines", and his book, The Lost Laugh, a history of American comedy set between the world wars, will be published by Fantagraphics in 2009.
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