David Hajdu
The Amazing Adventures of Pulitzer Winners
Yesterday was a proud day for the winners of the 2008 Pulitzer Prizes. But after the last of the champagne goes flat and their backs stop stinging from all that slapping, what do they do with themselves?
Comment on websites that make passing references to their work, of course. On Friday, Slate ran an article by Jeet Heer about Frederic Wertham, the psychiatrist who whipped American into a moral panic over indecency in comic books in the 1950s. Wertham, who wrote Seduction of the Innocent, appears in David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America as well as in Michael Chabon's 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, in what Slate's Heer calls "a brief and unsympathetic cameo." read more »
The Graphic Roots of the Generation Gap
THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE: THE GREAT COMIC-BOOK SCARE AND HOW IT CHANGED AMERICA
By David Hajdu
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 434 pages, $26
Earlier this month, a trendy bar in the East Village hosted what it billed as a “Nerd Nite” about the death of 1950’s horror comics, advertising the event with a listing that evoked all the kitsch and sensationalism of classic pulp: “A Senator looking to raise his national profile for a White House bid! A sex-obsessed psychiatrist blaming comics for juvenile delinquency! A comic book publisher on speed! Blood! Sex! Violence! Communism! A showdown in the Senate! Censorship! Death!” read more »
Eight Day Week
Times, They Were A-Changin' A Heady Folk Scene, Circa 1965
Pamphleteer's Press Drops Bomb On Myths of Atomic Age
