Category: antimodernism

Are you a Babbitt?

Miscellany resulting from a scan of my bookshelves. I collected about thirty pamphlets in this series (3″x2″), published out of Girard, Kansas, mostly in the 1920s. This one is a guide to “middle Americans” on how they can discern if they are being satirized as Babbitts and reasons why they...

Sylvia Beach on boots in a time of Nazi anti-modernism (yes, not “books” but “boots”)

In a 1960 issue of Kenyon Review I came across a transcript of a conversation moderated by the literary historian of modernism, Jackson Mathews, with Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the famous Parisian modernist bookstore, Shakespeare & Company—haven for expatriate and local avant-gardists. She’s remembering what happened when a Nazi soldier...