Teenage The Prehistory of Youth Culture: 1875-1945

Tradition holds that teenagers, as we think of them, were born in the 1950s as rockers and beatniks. In fact, all the basic tenets of postwar teen life-from consumer passions to emotional unrest-had been in place years before that. Opening in America in the 1890s, Teenage is the untold story of the era of ferment, folly, experimentation, and rebellion-from England's Bright Young Things of the 1920s to Germany's Wandervogel-that allowed the "Teen Age" to separate itself from the rest of society forever. In a monumental work of cultural investigative reporting, Jon Savage draws widely on film, music, literature high and low, fashion, politics, and art, and fuses popular culture, politics, and social history into a stunning chronicle of modern life. Book jacket.

-ôCompulsive reading . . . Teenage is a rich, rewarding book that makes an important contribution to cultural history.-ö
-ùCamille Paglia, The New York Times Book Review

-ôResonant . . . Savage explores . . . [an] array of teenager types, from the wild, sensational precursors to juvenile delinquency to the straight-laced good-citizen proto-preppie. It-'s Savage-'s claim to being a great historian, and it-'s mighty convincing.-ö
-ùThe Onion