The New Entrepreneurs (Hardback)

Jon Kraszewski (author)

£38.00

Hardback 236 Pages / Published: 14/01/2011

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Synopsis

According to the sociologist C. Wright Mills in his 1951 book, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, the "new entrepreneur" was a lone wolf able to succeed in post-World War II corporate America by elusively meandering through various institutions. During this time, anthology writers such as Rod Serling, Reginald Rose, and Paddy Chayefsky achieved a level of creativity that has rarely been equaled on television since. Yet despite their success, anthology writers still needed to evade the constraints and censorship of 50s television in order to stay true to their creative powers and political visions. Thus they worked as new entrepreneurs who adapted their more controversial scripts for the Hollywood, Broadway, and book publishing industries. Even after the television networks cancelled their prestigious anthology series at the end of the 50s, the most resilient writers were able to redefine what it meant to be entrepreneurs by launching cutting-edge shows such as The Twilight Zone and The Defenders that are still popular today. The New Entrepreneurs includes detailed textual analysis of legendary, sometimes hard-to-find, television anthology scripts that have received only cursory glances in television history until now.

Publisher: University Press of New England
ISBN: 9780819569462
Number of pages: 236
Weight: 503 g
Dimensions: 229 x 152 x 22 mm

MEDIA REVIEWS

The strength of The New Entrepreneurs lies in its careful research into the seldom-examined archives of individual television writers. The New Entrepreneurs provides a welcome addition to early television history by recontextualizing some key figures in the celebrated developmental age of television. Joshua Gleich, Velvet Light Trap"
Kraszewski s book presents a stunning new and complete vision of the Golden Age dramatists .The New Entrepreneurs achieves a rich perspective on this period and on the analysis of media industries in general through its synthesis of aesthetic, social-historical, and economic perspectives. Tom Kemper, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television"
"Kraszewski is able to show that his 'new entrepreneurs' did bring a surprising amount of liberal politics to television in the 1950s." --Kathy M. Newman, American Quarterly