Visions of Belonging explores how beloved and still-remembered family stories—A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, I Remember Mama, Gentleman's Agreement, Death of a Salesman, Marty, and A Raisin in the Sun—entered the popular imagination and shaped collective dreams in the postwar years and into the 1950s. These stories helped define widely shared conceptions of who counted as representative Americans and who could be recognized as belonging. The book listens in as white and black authors and directors, readers and viewers reveal divergent, emotionally textured, and politically charged social visions. Their diverse perspectives provide a point of entry into an extraordinary time when the possibilities for social transformation seemed boundless. But changes were also fiercely contested, especially as the war's culture of unity receded in the resurgence of cold war anticommunism, and demands for racial equality were met with intensifying white resistance. Judith E. Smith traces the cultural trajectory of these family stories, as they circulated widely in bestselling paperbacks, hit movies, and popular drama on stage, radio, and television. Visions of Belonging provides unusually close access to a vibrant conversation among white and black Americans about the boundaries between public life and family matters and the meanings of race and ethnicity. Would the new appearance of white working class ethnic characters expand Americans'understanding of democracy? Would these stories challenge the color line? How could these stories simultaneously show that black families belonged to the larger "family" of the nation while also representing the forms of danger and discriminations that excluded them from full citizenship? In the 1940s, war-driven challenges to racial and ethnic borderlines encouraged hesitant trespass against older notions of "normal." But by the end of the 1950s, the cold war cultural atmosphere discouraged probing of racial and social inequality and ultimately turned family stories into a comforting retreat from politics. The book crosses disciplinary boundaries, suggesting a novel method for cultural history by probing the social history of literary, dramatic, and cinematic texts. Smith's innovative use of archival research sets authorial intent next to audience reception to show how both contribute to shaping the contested meanings of American belonging.

This collection of interviews with Stanley Kauffmann (b. 1916) provides a virtual history of the journalistic practice of criticism in twentieth-century America. His creative life spans seven decades, and since 1958, he has been a film and drama critic for the New Republic, the New York Times, and Saturday Review. He also has been an actor, stage manager, playwright, novelist, and editor. Along with Dwight Macdonald, Andrew Sarris, and John Simon, he is one of the potent, influential critics included in the New York school of twentieth-century American criticism. The Los Angeles Times called him "the Dean Swift of our country's criticism." Susan Sontag proclaimed him "one of our national treasures." In this collection of interviews conducted by Charlie Rose, Dick Cavett, and others he speaks both of the role of theater and film criticism in American culture and of the crisis he perceives within it. With wit and erudition Kauffmann discusses many subjects-film directors who emerged during his long tenure at the New Republic (e.g., Martin Scorsese and Federico Fellini), actors who performed on both stage and screen, novels and their film adaptations, and the fractious relationship between Hollywood and the independent film movement. The precision and concise phrasing of Kauffmann's writing chime also in his brilliant conversations as he speaks of sex, taste, realism, the rise of film festival culture, and government subsidy of the arts. The volume ends with a conversation from 1998 in celebration of Kauffmann's forty-year tenure at the New Republic, where he continues to publish film reviews every week. The collection reveals this critic's sense of cultural mission by showing how Kauffmann applies to drama and film the same high standards he applies to fiction, poetry, music, and theater. Conversations with Stanley Kauffmann reveals that this love of the arts is expressed in his finely honed gift for cogent, witty, wise commentary. Bert Cardullo, a professor of theater and drama at the University of Michigan, has written and edited several books on film and theater and has been published in the Hudson Review, the New Republic, Literature / Film Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, and other publications.