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their values were bound up with a world in decline, which
increasingly lost all effective meaning in the years after 1945,
when the South began to join the nation and suffer the general
stresses of modern society. But the particular accent of the New
York intellectuals, as I have implied, was international. They
were rootless cosmopolitans, children of immigrants, spawned
by Jewish-atheist systems of thought like Marxism and Freud–
ianism, which still had little meaning for most Americans, even
for home-bred American socialists. Their affinities were Euro–
pean rather than English or American, just as the writers they
nurtured, like Bellow and Malamud, had more affinity for the
Russian and Central European novel than for the English. Their
minority culture had a special commitment to European mod–
ernism, and to many of the moral and ideological issues that had
long agitated European intellectuals. (This was heightened
when many of the Europeans themselves arrived here as emigres
in the thirties and forties). They saw themselves in European
terms as an intransigeant avant-garde whose cultural preferences
had political significance and whose goal was to create a
standard of judgment and debate rather than to affect mass taste
or public action. Yet few of them were as intransigeant or
adversary as they liked to suppose.
After World War II the whole culture shifted in their
direction, and this created the appearance that these writers had
exerted great influence. The growth of the mass media, which
the intellectuals deplored, finally managed to overwhelm the
stubborn regional cultures, which subsisted on primitive com–
munications. Industrial growth depleted the farms and small
towns while technology changed the lives of those who re–
mained. Hollywood and television reached into the cities and
towns alike with the mythified image of a small-town America
that their very presence was helping to abolish. Robert Warshow
pinpoints this myth, and one of its political meanings, as he
describes the opening moments of one particularly virulent cold
war movie in 1952:
The film opens on a " typical" American town of the kind that
certain Hollywood directors could probably construct with th eir eyes
