A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books

by Beam, Alex

• ISBN13: 9781586487768
• ISBN10: 1586487760
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-10-13
• Publisher: Public Affairs

Summary

Today, the classics written by the proverbial dead white men are cannon fodder in the culture wars, but in the 1950s and 1960s they were a pop culture phenomenon. Beam explores the Great Books mania, in this strangely poignant portrait of America on the threshold of the television age.

Author Biography

Alex Beam is an award-winning columnist for the Boston Globe. His writing has also appeared in the Atlantic, Slate, the New York Times and many other magazines. The author of Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America’s Premier Mental Hospital, and of two novels, he lives in Boston.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
The Headwaters	p. 7
The Odd Couple	p. 23
The Great Books in the Gray City	p. 37
Great Books Good for You!	p. 57
The Making of the Books	p. 75
Faster, Pussycat! Sell! Sell!	p. 95
Second Verse Not the Same as the First	p. 117
The People of the Book	p. 135
Epictetus at the Cash Register: Chicago and Columbia	p. 151
Hard Core: St. John's College	p. 165
Among the Bookies	p. 181
Dead Books Walking	p. 191
Acknowledgments	p. 203
The (Randomly Annotated) Great Books of the Western World	p. 207
Notes on Sources	p. 223
Index	p. 229
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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