Murphy has laced a fresh, wide-ranging synthesis with probing portraits of individuals in a way that will prove useful to students and scholars alike.

Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester

The New Era takes as its point of departure the insights of William Ogburn and Van Wyck Brooks into the tension between culture and social experience in the early years of the twentieth century. Intellectuals and artists made that tension the object of their own creative work, Paul Murphy explains, and offered new syntheses intended to overcome it. The exploration of hybrid ethnic identities by novelists Nella Larsen and Jean Toomer and sociologist Robert Park, Hart Crane’s ambition to reconcile poetic form and technological power, and Mary Parker Follett’s attempt to integrate the individual and the group in a new pluralist politics are among the many intriguing episodes in his wide-ranging survey of the period. By the decade’s end, the quest for a common fund of values, ideas, and symbols—a unified culture of modernity—had emerged as the defining feature of the intellectual vocation and the most important legacy of the twenties for what followed.

Casey Nelson Blake, Columbia University

A deft and often surprising reconsideration of a decade we thought we knew. Murphy's insights hold obvious implications for our own time.

Gregory Sumner, author of Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut's Life and Novels