In this encyclopedic study, Michael Denning recovers the left-wing culture of the 1930s from critics like Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe and historians like Warren Sussman, who described it as sentimental and shallow, as empty agitprop produced by fellow travelers misled into serving Stalin. From Billy Holiday singing "Strange Fruit" to Orson Welles making Citizen Kane, to John Dos Passos writing U.S.A., Popular Front culture, Denning shows, had a breadth, depth, and significance that its critics have failed to see or understand. Denning enlists Gramsci to argue the left had cultural hegemony in the thirties for the first time in U.S. history, and that the Popular Front brought a "deep and lasting transformation of American modernism and mass culture" (p. xvi). One of the book's central arguments is that Popular Front culture did not begin and end with the Communist party. Denning denies that the antagonism between Stalinists and anti-Stalinists on the left formed the center of thirties left culture, that it provides the starting place today for analysis and criticism. That antagonism, he argues, was important in New York, but not so important elsewhere; and, even in New York, the two sides had more in common than they perceived at the time. Here Denning cites an excellent authority-Richard Hofstadter, who grew up in the thirties Left, and then during the fifties shared the Kazin-Howe critique. But in the 1967 preface to The American Political Tradition, Hofstadter wrote that "the differences that seemed very sharp and decisive to those who dwelt altogether within [the thirties Left] had begun to lose their distinctness" in retrospect, and that "men on different sides of a number of questions appeared as having more in common, in the end, than one originally imagined" (p. 25). Even those who broke with the CP continued to produce work with the same "structure of feeling," Denning argues, pointing to Elia Kazan and Richard Wright. The antagonism of Stalinists and anti-Stalinists, Denning argues, was not just a matter of ideological commitment and critique, as the participants