Deconstructing Post-WWII New York City: The Literature, Art, Jazz, and Architecture of an Emerging Global Capital

Situating post-WWII New York literature within the material context of American urban history, this work analyzes how literary movements such as the Beat Generation, the New York poets and Black Arts Moment criticized the spatial restructuring of post-WWII New York City. Rejecting the dominant trends in post-WWII American urbanism--from International Style Modernist corporate architecture to suburban sprawl--as material expressions of corporate capitalism, these writers attempted to imagine alternative, more democratic and more multicultural, urban possibilities.