Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics

Guys Like Us considers how writers of the 1950s and '60s struggled to craft literature that countered the politics of consensus and anticommunist hysteria in America, and how notions of masculinity figured in their effort. Michael Davidson examines a wide range of postwar literature, from the fiction of Jack Kerouac to the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath. He also explores the connection between masculinity and sexuality in films such as Chinatown and The Lady from Shanghai, as well as television shows, plays, and magazines from the period. What results is a virtuoso work that looks at American poetic and artistic innovation through the revealing lenses of gender and history.

Michael Davidson is a professor of American literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author, most recently, of Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word and editor of The New Collected Poems of George Oppen. Davidson is also the author of eight books of poetry, including The Arcades and Post Hoc.