Louis Menand and Michael Gorra, "Culture and The Cold War"

The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense―economic and political, artistic and personal.

In The Free World, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar and critic Louis Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. In this, his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years.

Menand is in conversation with one of America’s most preeminent literary critics, Michael Gorra.