The American people’s love of entertainment is evident to anyone who’s ever been to a touring Broadway musical or lavish Hollywood film. From its biggest entertainers to its eccentric artists, reclusive novelists, postmodern dancers and rule-breaking architects, Americans have had an outsized influence on arts scenes the world over. Geography and race are the key elements that join together to inspire the varied regionalism at the core of each discipline.
Hollywood and American film are virtually inseparable. No less an American icon than the White House itself, Hollywood is increasingly the product of an internationalized cinema and film culture. This evolution is partly pure business: Hollywood studios are the showpieces of multinational corporations, and funding flows to talent that brings the biggest grosses, regardless of nationality.
But this shift is also creative. It’s Hollywood’s recognition that if the studios don’t incorporate the immense filmmaking talent emerging worldwide, they will be made irrelevant by it. Co-option is an old Hollywood strategy, used most recently to subvert the challenge posed by the independent film movement of the 1990s that kicked off with daring homegrown films like Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Reservoir Dogs, and innovative European imports. That said, for the most part, mainstream American audiences remain steadfastly indifferent to foreign films.
After years of being dominated by men, the TV and film industries are finally making space for female-led projects. Creative talents such as Issa Rae, Mindy Kaling, Gina Rodriguez and Rachel Bloom have starred in or produced stellar TV projects, while the all-female (and African American) stars of Hidden Figures drew flocks of eager moviegoers and the complicated moms of Big Little Lies lit up HBO. Perhaps the ultimate expression of this change is the emergence of the female superhero, from TV’s Supergirl and Jessica Jones to top-grossing films like Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel.
It could be argued that TV was the defining medium of the 20th century. In its brief history, TV has proved to be one of the most passionately contested cultural battlegrounds in American society, blamed for a whole host of societal ills, from skyrocketing obesity to plummeting attention spans and school test scores. The average American still watches loads of TV a week (35.5 hours if you believe the commonly touted figure), but they are watching differently, often streaming their favorite shows via providers such as Netflix and Amazon Prime.
For many decades, critics sneered that TV was lowbrow, and movie stars wouldn’t be caught dead on it. But well-written, thought-provoking shows have existed almost since the beginning. In the 1950s, the original I Love Lucy show was groundbreaking: shot on film before a live audience and edited before airing, it pioneered syndication. It established the sitcom (‘situation comedy’) formula, and showcased a dynamic female comedian, Lucille Ball, in an interethnic marriage.
Indeed, ‘good’ American TV has been around for a long time, whether through artistic merit or cultural and political importance. The 1970s comedy All in the Family aired an unflinching examination of prejudice, as embodied by bigoted patriarch Archie Bunker, played by Carroll O’Connor. Similarly, the sketch-comedy show Saturday Night Live, which debuted in 1975, pushed social hot buttons with its subversive, politically charged humor.
In the 1980s, videotapes brought movies into American homes, blurring the distinction between big and small screens, and the stigma Hollywood attached to TV slowly faded. The decade also saw the rise of shows such as The Golden Girls, a humorous sitcom that explored themes like aging and mortality (as well as more taboo topics such as sexuality among the elderly). It starred four retired women living in Miami and was both critically acclaimed and a commercial success.
In the 1990s, TV audiences embraced the unformulaic, no-holds-barred-weird cult show Twin Peaks, leading to a slew of provocative idio-syncratic series such as The X-Files.
These days, the most popular shows are a mix of edgier, long-narrative serial dramas, as well as cheap-to-produce, ‘unscripted’ reality TV: what Survivor started in 2000, the contestants and ‘actors’ of The Voice, Dancing with the Stars, Project Runway and Keeping up with the Kardashians keep alive today, for better or for worse.
As cable TV has emerged as the frontier for daring and innovative programming, some of the TV shows of the past decade have proved as riveting and memorable as anything American viewers (and the scores of people around the world who watch American TV) have ever seen. Streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, and niche networks such as AMC and HBO, have created numerous lauded series, including Mad Men (which followed the antics of 1960s advertising execs in NYC), Portlandia (a satire of Oregonian subcultures) and Breaking Bad (about a terminally ill high-school teacher who starts cooking meth to safeguard his family’s financial future). More recent favorites include The Marvelous Mrs Maisel (about a Jewish female comic trying to make it in 1950s NYC), Atlanta (a comedy-drama starring Donald Glover), Stranger Things (a supernatural saga set in the 1980s that recalls The Goonies) and The Handmaid’s Tale (a near-future dystopia based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel). A number of previously canceled series have also returned from the dead with mixed results in the last few years, including The Twilight Zone, Veronica Mars, The X-Files and 90210 (for the third time).
America first articulated a vision of itself through its literature. Until the American Revolution, many of the continent’s colonial citizens identified with England, but after independence, an immediate call went out to develop an American national voice. Not until the 1820s, however, did writers take up the two aspects of American life that had no counterpart in Europe: the untamed wilderness and the frontier experience.
James Fenimore Cooper is credited with creating the first truly American literature with The Pioneers (1823). In Cooper’s ‘everyman’ humor and individualism, Americans first recognized themselves.
In his essay Nature (1836), Ralph Waldo Emerson articulated similar ideas, but in more philosophical and spiritual terms. Emerson claimed that nature reflected God’s instructions for humankind as plainly as the Bible did, and that individuals could understand these through rational thought and self-reliance. Emerson’s writings became the core of the transcendentalist movement, which Henry David Thoreau championed in Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854).
Literary highlights of this era include Herman Melville’s ambitious Moby Dick (1851) and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s examination of the dark side of conservative New England in The Scarlet Letter (1850). Canonical poet Emily Dickinson wrote haunting, tightly structured poems, which were first published in 1890, four years after her death.
The celebration of common humanity and nature reached its apotheosis in Walt Whitman, whose poetry collection Leaves of Grass (1855) signaled the arrival of an American literary visionary. In Whitman’s informal, intimate, rebellious free verse were songs of individualism, democracy, earthy spirituality, taboo-breaking sexuality and joyous optimism that encapsulated the heart of a throbbing new nation.
But not everything was coming up roses. Abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe’s controversial novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) depicted African American life under slavery with Christian romanticism, but also enough realism to inflame passions on both sides of the ‘great debate’ over slavery, which would shortly plunge the nation into civil war.
After the Civil War (1861–65), two enduring literary trends emerged: realism and regionalism. Regionalism was especially spurred by the rapid late 19th-century settlement of the West (think novelist Jack London), but it was also popular in the South (Kate Chopin’s stories about the Louisiana Bayou) and the Great Plains (Willa Cather’s My Àntonia).
However, it was Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) who came to define this era of American letters. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Twain made explicit the quintessential American narrative of an individual journey of self-discovery. The image of Huck and Jim – a poor white teenager and a runaway black slave – standing outside society’s norms and floating together toward an uncertain future down the Mississippi River challenges American society still. Twain wrote in the vernacular, loved ‘tall tales’ and reveled in satirical humor and absurdity, while his folksy, ‘anti-intellectual’ stance endeared him to everyday readers.
With the dramas of world wars and a newly industrialized society for artistic fodder, American literature came into its own in the 20th century.
Dubbed the ‘Lost Generation,’ many US writers, most famously Ernest Hemingway, became expats in Europe. Hemingway’s novels exemplified the era, and his spare, stylized realism has often been imitated, yet never bettered. Other notable American figures at Parisian literary salons included modernist writers Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, and iconoclast Henry Miller, whose semiautobiographical novels were published in Paris, only to be banned for obscenity and pornography in the USA until the 1960s.
F Scott Fitzgerald eviscerated East Coast society life with his fiction, while John Steinbeck became the great voice of rural working poor in the West, especially during the Great Depression. William Faulkner examined the South’s social rifts in dense prose riddled with bullets of black humor.
Between the world wars, the Harlem Renaissance also flourished, as African American intellectuals and artists took pride in their culture and undermined racist stereotypes. Among the most well-known writers were poet Langston Hughes and novelist Zora Neale Hurston.
After WWII, American writers delineated ever-sharper regional and ethnic divides, pursued stylistic experimentation and often caustically repudiated conservative middle-class American values. Writers of the 1950s Beat Generation, such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, threw themselves like Molotov cocktails onto the profusion of smug suburban lawns. Meanwhile, novelists JD Salinger and Ken Kesey, Russian immigrant Vladimir Nabokov and poet Sylvia Plath darkly chronicled descents into madness by characters who struggled against stifling social norms.
The South, always ripe with paradox, inspired masterful short-story writers and novelists Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty and novelist Dorothy Allison. The mythical romance and modern tragedies of the West have found their champions in Chicano writer Rudolfo Anaya, Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy, whose characters poignantly tackle the rugged realities of Western life.
As the 20th century ended, American literature became ever more personalized, starting with the ‘me’ decade of the 1980s. Narcissistic, nihilistic narratives by writers such as Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis catapulted the ‘Brat Pack’ into pop culture.
Since the 1990s, an increasingly diverse, multiethnic panoply of voices reflects the society Americans live in. Ethnic identity (especially that of immigrant cultures), regionalism and narratives of self-discovery remain at the forefront of American literature, no matter how experimental. The quarterly journal McSweeney’s, founded by Dave Eggers, publishes titans of contemporary literature such as Joyce Carol Oates and Michael Chabon, as well as inventive humor pieces from new voices.
For a sweeping, almost panoramic look at American society, read Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001). More recent literary hits include Angela Flournoy’s 2015 National Book Award–winning debut, The Turner House, which traces the history of a Detroit family through three generations. Paul Beatty’s electric satire about race in America, The Sellout (2015) made him the first US author to win Britain’s Man Booker Prize. And Tommy Orange’s piercing debut, There There (2018) follows 12 contemporary Native Americans who come together at a powwow in Oakland, California. Watch out for emerging writers such as Lisa Halliday, Brit Bennett, Ling Ma and Yaa Gyasi.
New York is the red-hot center of the art world, and its make-or-break influence shapes tastes across the nation and around the globe. But the USA’s modern art scene is diverse, and pops up in some unusual and out-of-the-way places. Today’s visual art and sculpture often engages with the political and social issues of the day in surprising ways.
Artists played a pivotal role in the USA’s 19th-century expansion, disseminating images of far-flung territories and reinforcing the call to Manifest Destiny. Thomas Cole and his colleagues in the Hudson River School translated European romanticism to the luminous wild landscapes of upstate New York, while Frederic Remington offered idealized, often stereotypical portraits of the Western frontier.
After the Civil War and the advent of industrialization, realism increasingly became prominent. Eastman Johnson painted nostalgic scenes of rural life, as did Winslow Homer, who later became renowned for watercolor seascapes.
New York’s Armory Show of 1913 introduced the nation to European modernism and changed the face of American art. It showcased impressionism, fauvism and cubism, including the notorious 1912 Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 by Marcel Duchamp, a French artist who later became an American citizen. The show was merely the first in a series of exhibitions evangelizing the radical aesthetic shifts of European modernism, and it was inevitable that American artists would begin to grapple with what they had seen. Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell and Isamu Noguchi produced sculptures inspired by surrealism and constructivism, while the precisionist paintings of Charles Demuth, Georgia O’Keeffe and Charles Sheeler combined realism with a touch of cubist geometry.
In the 1930s, the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), part of Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal, commissioned murals, paintings and sculptures for public buildings nationwide. WPA artists borrowed from Soviet social realism and Mexican muralists to forge a socially engaged figurative style with regional flavor.
In the wake of WWII, American art underwent a sea change at the hands of New York School painters such as Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Elaine de Kooning and Mark Rothko. Moved by surrealism’s celebration of spontaneity and the unconscious, these artists explored abstraction and its psychological potency through imposing scale and the gestural handling of paint. The movement’s ‘action painter’ camp went extreme; Pollock, for example, made his drip paintings by pouring and splattering pigments over large canvases.
Having stood the test of time, abstract expressionism is widely considered to be the first truly original school of American art.
Once established in America, abstract expressionism reigned supreme. However, stylistic revolts had begun much earlier, in the 1950s. Most notably, Jasper Johns came to prominence with thickly painted renditions of ubiquitous symbols, including targets and the American flag, while Robert Rauschenberg assembled artworks from comics, ads and even – à la Duchamp – found objects (a mattress, a tire, a stuffed goat). Both artists helped break down traditional boundaries between painting and sculpture, opening the field for pop art in the 1960s.
America’s postwar economic boom also influenced pop. Not only did artists embrace representation, they drew inspiration from consumer images such as billboards, product packaging and media icons. Employing mundane mass-production techniques to silkscreen paintings of movie stars and Coke bottles, Andy Warhol helped topple the myth of the solitary artist laboring heroically in the studio. Roy Lichtenstein combined newsprint’s humble Benday dots with the representational conventions of comics. Suddenly, so-called ‘serious’ art could be political, bizarre, ironic and fun – and all at once.
What became known as minimalism shared pop’s interest in mass production, but all similarities ended there. Like the abstract expressionists, artists such as Donald Judd, Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman eschewed representational subject matter; their cool, reductive works of the 1960s and ‘70s were often arranged in gridded compositions and fabricated from industrial materials.
By the 1980s, civil rights, feminism and AIDS activism had made inroads in visual culture; artists not only voiced political dissent through their work, but embraced a range of once-marginalized media, from textiles and graffiti to video, sound and performance. The decade also ushered in the so-called Culture Wars, which commenced with tumult over photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. Break-out artists Futura 2000, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat moved from the subways and the streets to the galleries, and soon to the worlds of fashion and advertising.
In February 2018, the presidential portraits of Michelle and Barack Obama were unveiled in the Smithsonian. Artists Amy Sherald and Kehinde Wiley, who painted the first lady and the president, were the first black artists to be commissioned for official presidential portraits.
To get the pulse of contemporary art in the US, check out works by artists such as Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, Diamond Stingily, Chuck Close, Max Hooper Schneider, Kerry James Marshall, Eddie Martinez and Josh Smith.
American theater is a three-act play of sentimental entertainment, classic revivals and urgent social commentary. From the beginning, Broadway musicals (www.livebroadway.com) have aspired to be ‘don’t-miss-this-show!’ tourist attractions. And today, they continue to be one of NYC’s biggest draws. Broadway shows earn over a billion dollars in revenue from ticket sales each year, with top shows pulling in a cool $1 million a week. The most successful Broadway shows, including the hip-hop hit Hamilton (which re-imagines the life of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton), often go on to even greater earnings worldwide. (Gross worldwide earnings of The Phantom of the Opera has now topped an astounding $6 billion.) Meanwhile, long-running classics such as The Lion King and Wicked continue to play before sold-out houses.
Independent theater arrived in the 1920s and ‘30s, with the Little Theatre Movement, which emulated progressive European theater and developed into today’s ‘off-Broadway’ scene. Always struggling and scraping, and mostly surviving, the country’s 2000 nonprofit regional theaters are breeding grounds for new plays and fostering new playwrights. Some also develop Broadway-bound productions, while others sponsor festivals dedicated to the Bard himself, William Shakespeare.
Eugene O’Neill – the first major US playwright, and still widely considered the best – put American drama on the map. After WWII, American playwrights joined the nationwide artistic renaissance. Two of the most famous were Arthur Miller, who famously married Marilyn Monroe and wrote about everything from middle-class male disillusionment to the dark psychology of the mob mentality of the Salem witch trials, and the prolific Southerner Tennessee Williams.
As in Europe, absurdism and the avant-garde marked American theater in the 1960s. Few were more scathing than Edward Albee, who started provoking bourgeois sensibilities. Neil Simon arrived at around the same time; his ever-popular comedies kept Broadway humming for 40 years.
Other prominent, active American dramatists emerging in the 1970s include David Mamet, Sam Shepard and innovative ‘concept musical’ composer Stephen Sondheim. August Wilson created a monumental 10-play ‘Pittsburgh Cycle’ dissecting 20th-century African American life.
Today, American theater is evolving in its effort to remain a relevant communal experience in an age of ever-isolating media. Shows including Breakfast with Mugabe explore the trauma of the past, while Avenue Q, with its trash-talking, love-making puppets, presents a hilarious send-up of life on Sesame Street. More immersive experiences such as Sleep No More put theater-goers inside the play to wander freely among wildly decorated rooms – including a graveyard, stables, a psychiatric ward and a ballroom – as the drama (loosely based on Macbeth) unfolds around them.
America fully embraced dance in the 20th century. New York City has always been the epicenter for dance innovation and the home of many premier dance companies, but every major city supports resident and touring troupes, both ballet and modern.
Modern ballet is said to have begun with Russian-born choreographer George Balanchine’s Apollo (1928) and Prodigal Son (1929). With these, Balanchine invented the ‘plotless ballet’ – in which he choreographed the inner structure of music, not a pantomimed story – and thereby created a new, modern vocabulary of ballet movement. In 1934, Balanchine founded the School of American Ballet; in 1948 he founded the New York City Ballet, turning it into one of the world’s foremost ballet companies. Jerome Robbins took over that company in 1983, after achieving fame choreographing huge Broadway musicals such as West Side Story (1957). Broadway remains an important venue for dance today. National companies elsewhere, such as San Francisco’s Lines Ballet, keep evolving contemporary ballet.
The pioneer of modern dance, Isadora Duncan, didn’t find success until she began performing in Europe at the turn of the 20th century. Basing her ideas on ancient Greek myths and concepts of beauty, she challenged the strictures of classical ballet and sought to make dance an intense form of self-expression.
Martha Graham founded the Martha Graham School for Contemporary Dance in 1926 after moving to New York, and many of today’s major American choreographers developed under her tutelage. In her long career she choreographed more than 140 works and developed a new dance technique, now taught worldwide, aimed at expressing inner emotion and dramatic narrative. Her most famous work was Appalachian Spring (1944).
Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor and Twyla Tharp succeeded Graham as leading exponents of modern dance; they all have companies that are active today. In the 1960s and ‘70s, Cunningham explored abstract expressionism in movement, collaborating famously with musician John Cage. Taylor experimented with everyday movements and expressions, while Tharp is known for incorporating pop music, jazz and ballet.
Another student of Martha Graham, Alvin Ailey, was part of the post-WWII flowering of African American culture. He made his name with Revelations (1960), two years after he founded the still-lauded Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York City.
Other celebrated postmodern choreographers include Mark Morris and Bill T Jones. Beyond New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis and Philadelphia are noteworthy for modern dance.
In the 21st century, computer technology and innovations in materials and manufacturing allow for curving, asymmetrical buildings once considered impossible, if not inconceivable. Architects are being challenged to ‘go green,’ and the creativity unleashed is riveting, transforming skylines and changing the way Americans think about their built environments. The public’s architectural taste remains conservative, but never mind: avant-garde ‘starchitects’ are revising urban landscapes with radical visions that the nation will catch up with – one day.
Perhaps the largest indigenous influence on American architecture are the adobe dwellings of the Southwest. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Spanish colonists incorporated elements of what they called the Native American pueblo (village). It reappeared in late-19th- and early-20th-century architecture in both the Southwest’s Pueblo Revival style and Southern California’s Mission Revival style.
Elsewhere until the 20th century, immigrant Americans mainly adopted English and continental European styles and followed their trends. For most early colonists in the eastern US, architecture served necessity rather than taste, while the would-be gentry aped grander English homes, a period well preserved in Williamsburg, VA.
After the Revolutionary War, the nation’s leaders wanted a style befitting the new republic and adopted neoclassicism. Virginia’s capitol, designed by Thomas Jefferson, was modeled on an ancient Roman temple, and Jefferson’s own private estate, Monticello, sports a Romanesque rotunda.
Professional architect Charles Bulfinch helped develop the more monumental federal style, which paralleled the English Georgian style. The grandest example is the US Capitol in Washington, DC, which became a model for state legislatures nationwide. As they moved into the 19th century, Americans, mirroring English fashions, gravitated toward the Greek and Gothic Revival styles, still seen today in many churches and college campuses.
In the 19th century, small-scale architecture was revolutionized by ‘balloon-frame’ construction: a light frame of standard-milled timber joined with cheap nails. Easy and economical, balloon-frame stores and houses made possible swift settlement of the expanding west and, later, the surreal proliferation of the suburbs. Home-ownership was suddenly within reach of average middle-class families, making real the enduring American Dream.
After the Civil War, influential American architects studied at Paris’ École des Beaux-Arts, and American buildings began to show increasing refinement and confidence. Major examples of the beaux-arts style include Richard Morris Hunt’s Biltmore Estate in North Carolina and New York’s Public Library.
In San Francisco and other cities across America, Victorian architecture appeared as the 19th century progressed. Among well-to-do classes, larger and fancier private houses added ever more adornments: balconies, turrets, towers, ornately painted trim and intricate ‘gingerbread’ wooden millwork.
In a reaction against Victorian opulence, the Arts and Crafts movement arose after 1900 and remained popular until the 1930s. Its modest bungalows, such as the Gamble House in Pasadena, CA, featured locally handcrafted wood and glasswork, ceramic tiles and other artisan details.
By the 1850s, internal iron-framed buildings had appeared in Manhattan, and this freed up urban architectural designs, especially after the advent of Otis hydraulic elevators in the 1880s. The Chicago School of architecture transitioned beyond beaux-arts style to produce the skyscraper – considered the first truly ‘modern’ architecture, and America’s most prominent architectural contribution to the world at that time.
In the 1930s, the influence of art deco – which became instantly popular in the US after the Paris Exposition of 1925 – meant that urban high-rises soared, becoming fitting symbols of America’s technical achievements, grand aspirations, commerce and affinity for modernism.
When the Bauhaus school fled the rise of Nazism in Germany, architects such as Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe brought their pioneering modern designs to American shores. Van der Rohe landed in Chicago, where Louis Sullivan, considered to be the inventor of the modern skyscraper, was already working on a simplified style of architecture in which ‘form ever follows function.’ This evolved into the International style, which favored glass ‘curtain walls’ over a steel frame. IM Pei, who designed Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, is considered the last living high-modernist architect in America.
In the mid-20th century, modernism transitioned into America’s suburbs, especially in Southern California. Mid-century modern architecture was influenced not only by the organic nature of Frank Lloyd Wright’s homes, but also the spare, geometric, clean-lined designs of Scandinavia. Post-and-beam construction allowed for walls of sheer glass that gave the illusion of merging indoor and outdoor living spaces. Today, a striking collection of mid-century modern homes and public buildings by Albert Frey, Richard Neutra and other luminaries can be found in Palm Springs, CA.
Rejecting modernism’s ‘ugly boxes’ later in the 20th century, postmodernism reintroduced decoration, color, historical references and whimsy. In this, architects such as Michael Graves and Philip Johnson took the lead. Another expression of postmodernism is the brash, mimetic architecture of the Las Vegas Strip, which Pritzker Prize–winning architect Robert Venturi held up as the triumphant antithesis of modernism (he sardonically described the latter as ‘less is a bore’).
Today, aided and abetted by digital tools, architectural design favors the bold and the unique. Leading this plunge into futurama has been Frank Gehry; his Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles is but one example. Other notable contemporary architects include Richard Meier (Los Angeles’ Getty Center), Thom Mayne (San Francisco’s Federal Building) and Daniel Libeskind (San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum and the Denver Art Museum’s Hamilton Building).
Even as the recession crippled the American economy in 2008 and stalled new construction, several phenomenal new examples of visionary architecture have burst upon the scene in American cities. Notable examples include Jeanne Gang’s Aqua Building in Chicago, Santiago Calatrava’s soaring World Trade Center transportation hub in New York City, Renzo Piano’s California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, David Adjaye’s shimmering National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, and Norman Foster’s spaceship-like Apple Park in Cupertino, CA.