Books by James D. Bloom

Treating Philip Roth as a war writeras well as a sportswriter, crime reporter, political commentator, and Newark chroniclerRoth's Wars: A Career in Conflict offers a thoroughly researched account of the novelist's preoccupation with wars around the world and wars at home. This wide-ranging social and cultural history of Roth's career examines intersections between Roth's preoccupations as a writer and the work of contemporaries, such as J.D. Salinger, Joan Didion, George Plimpton, Hannah Arendt, E.L. Doctorow, Flannery O'Connor, Michael Herr, and Don DeLillo. The legends and icons who figure in this account of Roth's career include Dwight Eisenhower, Meyer Lansky, Ernie Pyle, Bob Dylan, Johnny Appleseed, Anne Frank, JFK, Mickey Mantle, the Marx Brothers, Thomas Paine, Sandy Koufax, and Franz Kafka.

The comedic work of the children of modern Jewish immigrants overturned the prevailing languages and imageries with which an Anglocentric United States had traditionally represented and expanded itself. In ^IGravity Fails: The Comic Jewish Shaping of Modern America^R, James D. Bloom approaches these developments by first surveying this transformation as it affected literature, entertainment, commerce, and politics, and then offers sharply focused chapters that look at changes in sexual candor, reactions to the Holocaust, and critiques of race.Indeed, the personae discussed here pioneered unprecedented candor toward and scrutiny about sex and violence, and no other book delves as deeply or as widely among art forms, media, and levels of cultural hierarchy. Including considerations of the work of such diverse artists as Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce, Gilda Radner, Philip Roth, Jerry Seinfeld, and Stephen Sondheim, Gravity Fails provides a unique, penetrating, and hilarious look at a major force in the progress of American culture.

Hollywood Intellect takes off from the wide-spread hand-wringing over the fate or disappearance of so-called public intellectuals. An account of the title phenomenon, Hollywood Intellect challenges assumptions on which such discussions have rested. James D. Bloom argues that such assumptions are the result of misleading inattention to the intellectual work that mass culture performs. Much of America's influential intellectual work has come out of Hollywood, which has long helped shape America's intellectual agenda. Bloom shows how Hollywood movies often do intellectual work as ambitious as the intellectual work in 'art films,' poems and novels, museums and erudite quarterlies. Hollywood Intellect prompts its readers to reflect on the impact of a variety of Hollywood movies with some of the same assumptions, expectations, and questions customarily applied to literary writing. Hollywood Intellect also illustrates how, in examining the emergence of Hollywood and stardom in general as shapers of the public mind, some of our most renowned poets and novelists enriched our experience of mass entertainment and of elite culture. Drawing on a range of literary works and movies, as well as on the careers of both Hollywood and literary celebrities, Bloom documents how Hollywood regulates curiosity, arbitrates civilization, construes and probes stardom, polices genre, and shapes our language.