Background
He was born on January 3, 1893 in Alliance, New Jersey, United States, the son of George Sergius Seldes, a pharmacist, and Anna Saphro, both Russian-Jewish immigrants.
(viii 120p blue cloth, stamps from a Cambridge college lib...)
viii 120p blue cloth, stamps from a Cambridge college library, decorative bookplate, spine hinges opening and tearing, pages and plates clean throughout
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(Excerpt from Your Money and Your Life: A Manual for the M...)
Excerpt from Your Money and Your Life: A Manual for the Middle Classes Some things, less tangible than a five-dolla bill, are no less valuable to us. Next to you pocketbook I put your peace of mind, becaus that seems to me the best general term for certai satisfactions you and I enjoy. Among thes satisfactions are working at jobs we like, getting married and bringing up a family (or doing eithe without the Other), choosing our aldermen and President, and saying what we like, or what we dislike, whenever we want to. All of these are threatened. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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(This is a book about America in the years of 1929-1932.)
This is a book about America in the years of 1929-1932.
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He was born on January 3, 1893 in Alliance, New Jersey, United States, the son of George Sergius Seldes, a pharmacist, and Anna Saphro, both Russian-Jewish immigrants.
Seldes graduated from Central High School in Philadelphia in 1910 and enrolled at Harvard, where he gravitated toward the literary set.
He joined the staff of the Harvard Monthly, and became active in the Harvard Dramatic Club, which in 1926 produced his play The Wise-Crackers. Seldes worked briefly as a reporter on the Pittsburgh Sun and as a music critic and editorial writer for the Philadelphia Evening Ledger from 1914 to 1916, when he left for England as a free-lance war correspondent.
After America's entry into World War I he served briefly in the army and then became American political correspondent of L'echo de Paris in Washington. Seldes' first book, The United States and the War (1917) was written earlier but published in England just as America entered the war.
After serving in 1919 as associate editor of Collier's Weekly, he became a managing editor of the recently reformulated Dial magazine, enlisted by its two new owners, Scofield Thayer and James Sibley Watson, Jr. , two of his Harvard associates. The new post placed Seldes at the center of a lively endeavor to bring a new aesthetic distinction to American literary life. As managing editor (1919 - 1923) and regular dramatic critic (1923 - 1929), Seldes gained an intimate knowledge of, and often friendship with, such leading literary figures of the 1920's as Edmund Wilson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ring Lardner.
He also contributed reviews and critical essays to the New Republic and the Freeman and wrote one of the first reviews (in the Nation) of James Joyce's Ulysses when it was published in 1922. That same year, he was instrumental in arranging for the first American publication, in the Dial, of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. His review of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) pronounced it "a brilliant work. "
Seldes paid his dues to the "serious arts, " but he also regularly gave notice to art forms not generally considered serious - the movies, vaudeville, and the popular theater of song and dance. He often tucked such notices into his theater reviews, panning a production of Somerset Maugham's play The Circle, or even Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie, by contrasting its effect upon an audience to that of Chaplin's film The Kid or a performance of Al Jolson.
In 1923, Seldes took a year's leave from the Dial and went to Paris, where he wrote The Seven Lively Arts (1924). Edmund Wilson, writing in the Dial, declared the book "a genuine contribution to America's new orientation in the arts which was inaugurated by America's Coming of Age, in 1915, and more violently promoted in 1917 by A Book of Prefaces" - a judgment from which hindsight need not demur.
Seldes continued to demonstrate his independence as a critic and his agility and versatility as a writer. Under the pseudonym Foster Johns, he published two mystery novels, The Victory Murders (1927) and The Square Emerald (1928), and a "serious" novel, The Wings and the Eagle (1929). In 1930 he published an adaptation of Lysistrata that was produced on Broadway in 1946.
Heeding the changing social and political scene of the 1930's, he published a little book, The Future of Drinking (1930). His most ambitious social criticism of these despairing years was Mainland (1936).
Seldes wrote The Movies and the Talkies (1929) and The Movies Come from America (1937). The steady outpouring of books was accompanied by continuing activity as a columnist for the New York Journal (1931 - 1937) and, in the late 1950's, for the Village Voice; as a script writer for radio and television (he published Writing for Television: A Writer's Handbook in 1952); as program director in the early days of television (1937 - 1945) for the Columbia Broadcasting System (he and a secretary constituted the whole department); as editor of the documentary film This Is America (1933); and as a teacher and dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania from 1959 to 1963, when he retired.
He died in New York City.
(viii 120p blue cloth, stamps from a Cambridge college lib...)
(Excerpt from Your Money and Your Life: A Manual for the M...)
(This is a book about America in the years of 1929-1932.)
While a patriot, Seldes was largely apolitical.
Before and during World War II, however, Seldes was completely committed to American exceptionalism. He emphasized the uniqueness of American culture and democracy against Europe's. Despite his populist inclinations, he was an anti-Communist.
He evaluated popular culture, introducing new sources like jazz, comics, film, television and radio to criticism. He praised them for their honesty, humour, and the technical skills of their performers. An anti-intellectual, he was also convinced that art, particularly popular entertainment, should avoid being overly cerebral and didactic. Subsequently, he staunchly opposed critics who recommended radio as a tool for formal education.
Quotations: "I've been carrying on a lover's quarrel with the popular arts for years, " he said. "It's been fun. Nothing like them. "
As a person, Seldes was as lively as the arts to which he was devoted; this was evident in his literary style and in his talk.
Quotes from others about the person
Gorham B. Munson described Seldes as one of the brightest, most "sharply intelligent of the young critics. Seldes differed, however, from others of the Dial set in being lighter and more agile, a roving critic, " Munson said, who had become "expert in making discriminations in the arts of levity and diversion, so much less charted and therefore so much more risky to the critical taste than the serious arts. "
Leo Mishkin, a critic for New York's The Morning Telegraph described Seldes' impact:
He was my teacher as he was also for thousands of other just coming of age back in the mid-1920s. Not in the sense of standing up in front of a classroom and lecturing, or correcting examinations…But outside of school one of the requirements we all had was to read The Dial . .. and when The Seven Lively Arts was published in 1924 we knew instinctively that a new age, a new appreciation of the arts, indeed a new horizon had opened up for us all. .. (His enthusiasms) will endure as long as the mass of American look for relaxation and rewards in the mass entertainment media. It was Gilbert Seldes who set the whole nation on that road. His name remains a monument to his influence.
Seldes married Alice Wadhams Hall on June 21, 1924. They had two children, one of whom, Marian Seldes, became a noted actress.