Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity.

• Author: Douglas, Susan

It is part of my job, as someone who teaches media studies, to keep up with the recent work on the history of popular entertainments and the rise of the mass media in America. This year, the task has been a real pleasure, and I want to recommend three truly wonderful books that are a delight to read, and compel us to rethink our cultural history.

Ann Douglas's tour de force, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (Farrar Straus Giroux), provides a pulsing, detailed, and vivid portrait of New York City's ascendance as cultural capital of America during this era, and explores how achieving this position depended absolutely on the tangled and troubled interconnections between African-American culture and mainstream white culture. Neal Gabler's dazzling biography, Winchell. Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity (Alfred A. Knopf), sees Walter Winchell's rise to stardom as emblematic of the shift in America to a new mass culture obsessed with fame, and with both building up and tearing down celebrities through the weapon of gossip.

George Chauncey's Gay New York. Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (Basic Books) takes a topic deeply closeted by historians and argues that gay life in New York was actually more tolerated, more visible, and less segregated in the early decades of the century than in the later ones. These are all big, fat books, and worth every single page.

Ann Douglas argues in Terrible Honesty that the often unspoken but nonetheless avowed project of many writers, musicians, and architects in the 1920s was cultural matricide: the overthrow of Victorian, bourgeois codes of decorum, propriety, and restraint too often associated with a stereotype of the proper, overly judgmental, upper-middle-class matriarch. It was this image (at odds, Douglas notes, with the reality of most women's power) that male artists cast themselves against. Thus she sees the rise of modernism--in literature, music, and architecture--as a self-consciously masculine enterprise.

But she also insists that the confident emergence of American music and letters in the 1920s from the shadow of European cultural authority could not have happened without African-American culture, especially its music, which was the first authentically American music the nation produced. American culture became envied and exportable abroad especially because of jazz and the blues, and Douglas is masterful at analyzing whites' love-hate...