The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture

This collection of essays, which originally appeared as a book in 1962, is the complete works of an editor of Commentary magazine who died at age 37 in 1955. Writing in The Nation, The Partisan Review, The Kenyon Review and American Mercury, Warshow examines the folklore of modern life. What he finds is as sensitive and penetrating as the writings of James Agee, George Orwell, and Walter Benjamin. Some of these essays—notably "The Westerner," "The Gangster as Tragic Hero," and pieces on the "New Yorker," "Mad Magazine," Arthur Miller's "The Crucible," and the Rosenberg letters—are classics, once anthologized but now hard to find. Also included are essays on Kafka, Hemingway and Gertrude Stein.