| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Daniel Belgrad. The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1998. Pp. xii, 343. $29.00.

In 1943, Edmund Wilson borrowed Herman Melville's term "shock of recognition" to describe the period beginning in the 1840s when "genius becomes aware of its kin," as writers recognized that they were jointly creating an American literature. Although Daniel Belgrad does not use Melville's term, in this illuminating study he documents similar, less nationalistic shocks of recognition in the 1940s and 1950s encompassing a wider range of arts. Painters such as Willem de Kooning and Grace Hartigan, ceramist Peter Voulkos, and writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg found passions similar to their own in the jazz experiments of such bebop musicians as Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk. In Belgrad's words, "the long thread through the cultural fabric of the period" that connected the efforts of these artists with one another—and with many others, including dancer Merce Cunningham, poet Charles Olson, and social critic Paul Goodman—was "the will to explore and record the spontaneous creative act" (p. 1). . . .

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