Trying to grasp the essential spirit of the thirties would seem to be a hopeless task. How can one era have produced both Woody Guthrie and Rudy Vallee, both the Rockettes high-stepping at the Radio City Music Hall and the Okies on their desperate trek toward the pastures of plenty in California? To readers of the journalist Eugene Lyons's 1941 bestseller it was the "Red Decade." Revisionist historians like Warren Susman and Loren Baritz countered by drawing attention to the conservative heartland of the middle class, with its deep economic fears yet also its interest in sports, mystery novels, self-improvement, and mass entertainment. Liberal historians such as Daniel Aaron, James B. Gilbert, and Richard Pells focused on the intellectual history of the thirties, analyzing the radicalism of the era in terms that reach back to prewar socialism and progressivism. Other writers, in the popular tradition of Frederick Lewis Allen's best-selling Only Yesterday (1931) and Since Yesterday (1940) or Robert and Helen Merrell Lynd's Middletown (1929) and Middletown in Transition (1937), concentrated on the social history of everyday life. Still others (like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the three volumes of his Age of Roosevelt) centered on the administrative and political history of the New Deal and the dramatic figure of Roosevelt himself, whose dominating presence became a force of mythic proportions. More recently, feminist scholars emphasized the unsung role of women writers in bringing gender issues, family histories, and deep personal emotions into the committed fiction and journalism of the era. Radical scholars have assiduously excavated the proletarian writing of the 1930s and explored the culture of the Popular Front, in part because they feel it has been unjustly neglected but also because they identify with its political direction. My own approach in this book is to focus on unusually complex, enduring works for what they reveal about the agebooks, films, music, and photographs that speak for their times yet still speak intimately to us today.