The crack in the picture window. [John Keats] Home. WorldCat Home About WorldCat Help. Search for Library Items Search for Lists Search for Contacts Search for a Library. Create lists, bibliographies and reviews: or Search WorldCat. Find items in libraries near you. In this amusingly written yet serious report about housing developments, author John C. Keats discusses every aspect of life in a development. His account is supported by solid facts and figures and presented in personal terms to convey an existence that combines all of the worst aspects and none of the advantages of suburban living. The Crack in the Picture Window was one of several critiques of 1950s American suburbia published aroudn this time, such as Auguste Spectorsky's The Exurbanites (1955) and Richard Yates's fictional indictment of suburbia, Revolutionary Road (1961). One rainy morning on Bataan Boulevard, Mary hangs her washing on a clothesline in the living room and knocks her shin on her son’s tricycle. Pain shoots up her leg and she bursts into tears. Then the front door blows open, and she starts shouting: ‘Watch out, can’t you see the wash is up? You’re getting the wash all dirty.’ Mary very nearly screamed. ‘I’m sorry dear,’ a familiar, monotonous voice said. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ Mary said. John Drone, master of all he surveyed, had returned to his castle and to the bosom of his admiring family. He closed the door. Mary and John are the unfortunate (fictional) protagonists of The Crack in the Picture Window, published in 1957 by John Keats, a journalist at the now defunct Washington Daily News. A lacerating (and very funny) indictment of postwar suburbs as 'fresh-air slums,' Keats’s polemic sold millions of copies in paperback. It revolves around the tragicomic story of the Drones, a nice young couple gulled, first, into buying a box at Rolling Knolls Estates, and then into thinking a larger, more expensive box in a different suburb could cure what ailed them. When, near the start of the book, Mary hurts her leg and yells at her husband, Keats blames her agitation on her inadequate living space. If the house had had a basement, he notes, she could have hung the washing there rather than in the living room. If it had had more storage space, the tricycle wouldn’t have stood in her way. ![]() If it had had a separate dining room, rather than a rudimentary 'dining alcove' off the kitchen, she wouldn’t have struggled to converse with a friend over the shouts of their children, which had frayed her nerves earlier the same day. The problem was not Mary. It was her house: [S]omewhere deep inside her she knew perfectly well that the house she inhabited had helped spoil her day; that it was harming her marriage and corroding her life. In fact, the corrosive process was well under way, for the Drones had lived in their new rambler for six months. The pattern of their lives was bearing out the truth in Winston Churchill’s dictum: ‘We shape our dwellings, and then our dwellings shape us.’ The shape of Mary’s dwelling was vile. The Crack in the Picture Window was just one in a raft of books about suburban life that appeared steadily through the 1950s and 1960s. A few of these have become cultural touchstones: Richard Yates’s novel Revolutionary Road (1961) still disturbs with its portrait of a corroded marriage, dramatized in a 2008 film starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. John Cheever’s stories of gin-soaked afternoons filled with longing and regret still telegraph upper-middle-class suburban anomie. But the books that didn’t last—forgotten volumes of pop sociology and psychology like Keats’s, and pulp fiction—can also tell us a lot about the preoccupations of midcentury Americans. Most strikingly, they reveal deep and widespread concern over the stability of mental and physical health in the new suburban environment. This was not confined to popular reading material; at academic conferences, speakers struck worried notes about the 'one-class community' and the 'filtered experience' of children growing up in a suburban setting. In the years after World War II, suburbs represented not just new places to live but a whole new manner of living, separated by more than physical distance from the big cities and small towns from which their residents hailed. Between the late 1940s and 1960, millions of Americans moved into raw neighborhoods containing people of about the same age, making about the same amount of money, starting families at about the same time. It was a social experiment unprecedented in U.S. The first suburbanites themselves were well aware of this. Although they felt the optimism of pioneers, they shared in the widespread anxiety that the experiment might not work, an anxiety that manifested as worries about unanticipated health effects. These ranged from the daily, cumulative frustrations of a Mary Drone to more significant problems: stomach ulcers, heart attacks, anxiety, depression, sexual dysfunction, and juvenile delinquency. 'John Drone did not know it when he signed the deed [for his house], but appalling human tensions were a condition of the sale,' Keats wrote. The financial burdens of suburban life were thought to weigh heavily on young husbands and fathers, though not on wives and mothers; the theory of suburban pathology was profoundly gendered. The harried suburban family man, gulping coffee each morning to catch his train into the city and returning to collapse, martini in hand, into his armchair each night, was a stock comic figure in postwar culture. Keats made his John Drone a more pitiable example of the type. Drone, a government worker, feels a 'tightening, knotted cord about his temples' after moving to Rolling Knolls. He lies awake at night fretting over installment payments on the car, the TV set, the dryer. When the family trades up from the rambler to a split-level in Maryland, he takes side jobs at a liquor store and at Sears to pay the mortgage, and he leaves the house at 6:00 every morning to beat the rush downtown. Despite all his labors, there is no final reward for John Drone: the victim of chicanery, he learns at the end of the book that he is liable for the mortgage on the rambler he thought he’d sold. The Drones are left to face financial ruin. Power iso 4 8 with serial number. In The Exurbanites (1955), a droll portrait of the writers and ad men who were then fanning out from Manhattan to the sleepy country towns of Bucks and Fairfield and Rockland counties, A.C. Spectorsky (a magazine and television editor) dubbed those towns 'the Psychosomatic Belt.' He continued: 'A physician with many exurban patients states that he has noticed, among a remarkably high percentage of those who are commuters, what he terms ‘extreme rigidity’ and a notable head of steam built up and (mostly) kept under pressure which he defines as repressed hostility.' ![]() According to Spectorsky, the doctor cited hay fever, hives, hypertension, back pain, and chronic fatigue as the commuter’s usual disorders. A quasi-scientific account of widespread male stress is presented in The Split-Level Trap, a bestselling 1961 study of suburban dysfunction by New Jersey psychiatrist Richard Gordon and his psychologist wife, Katherine Gordon. ('A Kinsey report on suburbia,' according to a review in the Chicago Daily News.) The Gordons contended that the nation’s new communities were a 'Disturbia' of restless and troubled young strivers, a lopsided society that lacked the balance of older, 'integrated' towns (integrated by age and class, that is, not race). Instrucciones maquina de coser singer antigua guatemala de. The original Singer sewing machine. Singer was granted a patent for the first Singer brand sewing machine. This machine was built in The photo was taken in.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |