Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
This sounds great:
ReplyDeleteWhat you can't predict is what will show up in the Story of the Week, which has featured F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, Paul Bowles, Sarah Orne Jewett and Thornton Wilder. Sometimes the stories are actually essays, by the likes of Howard Zinn and Raymond Chandler. Sign up here http://storyoftheweek.loa.org/ to receive the Library of America's Story of the Week for free; it arrives in your e-mail box every Monday.
It does. LOA seems to have moved beyond the stuffy confines of academia.
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