Modernism in the Streets A Life and Times in Essays

Essays tracing the intellectual life of a quintessential New York City writer and thinker

Marshall Berman was one of the great urbanists and Marxist cultural critics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and his brilliant, nearly sui generis book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is a masterpiece of the literature on modernism. But like many New York intellectuals, the essay was his characteristic form, accommodating his multifarious interests and expressing his protean, searching exuberant mind. This collection includes early essays from and on the radical ’60s, on New York City, on literary figures from Kafka to Pamuk, and late essays on rock, hip hop, and gentrification. Concluding with his last essay, completed just before his death in 2013, this book is Berman’s intellectual autobiography, tracing his career as a thinker through the way he read the “signs in the street.””

Marshall Berman was Distinguished Professor of Political Science at City College of New York and CCNY Graduate Center, where he taught Political Theory and Urban Studies and is the author of The Politics of Authenticity, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, and On the Town.

David Marcus is co-editor of Dissent and teaches in the Contemporary Civilization Program at Columbia University, where he is also a PhD candidate. He frequently contributes essays on literature and politics to The New Republic, n+1, Bookforum, and Le Monde.