My Pilgrim's Progress: Media Studies, 1950-1998 [Hardcover]

George W.S. Trow (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 15, 1998

In My Pilgrim's Progress, George W. S. Trow gives us a brilliantly original and provocative look at what's happened to America in our time -- a guided tour of the media, the politics, and the personalities of the last half-century by one of our most persuasive social critics.

This new book by the author of Within the Context of No Context might be subtitled "A son of Roosevelt reads newspapers, goes to the movies, watches television, and tells us how 1950 got to be 1998." Trow takes 1950 as the year the Old World gave way to the New: Winston Churchill had just been named The Man of the Half-Century by Time magazine; George Bernard Shaw was still alive, and so was William Randolph Hearst. But before the next half-decade was out, the world represented by these powerful old men had disappeared.

To illustrate his points, Trow takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride through the New York Times of February 1950, from the thundering front pages where the terror of the H-bomb is making its first appearance to the early, sketchy, amateur television listings. He finds a piece of Television Personality Reportage in the paper -- a kind of proto-People magazine profile -- of the TV "hostess" and "guest" Faye Emerson, and notes: "As to World War II, the Germans lost, and Faye Emerson won."

The son of a tabloid journalist from an old New York brownstone family, Trow was brought up in the Deepest Roosevelt Aesthetic -- half FDR and half Walter Winchell. But he soon succumbed to the spell of Dwight David Eisenhower and the extraordinary/ordinary qualities of Ike's era. It is the thrust of Trow's book that both the Roosevelt authority and the Ike decencies are completely gone -- and where are they now that we need them more than ever?

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"I don't just like Ike," declares George W.S. Trow, "I love him. I think he's the guy of guys, I think he's uniquely American, and I'm sorry we're not going to have him anymore." That admiration permeates the pages of My Pilgrim's Progress, a stream-of-consciousness consideration of "how 1950 got to be 1998." As an analysis of how American culture became media culture, My Pilgrim's Progress is brilliant and insightful, particularly the sections on modern newspaper journalism and what Trow calls "the aesthetic of Dwight David Eisenhower" (in which he segues from the novels of John O'Hara to an appearance by Joan Rivers on QVC). But readers will either be seduced or driven mad by Trow's rambling, I-know-what-I'm-talking-about-just-trust-me prose style, in many cases literally transcribed from tapes of his immediate reactions to old newspaper headlines. Although you can't say you weren't warned: Trow advises at one point, "I just want to discuss the attractive inevitability of visceral reactions, which, of course, is exactly our political process, especially our presidential process, and I'm going to do it from a personal point of view." --Ron Hogan

From Publishers Weekly

Within the Context of No Context, Trow's searing 1980 study of modern media, is a classic of its genre. Taking the claim of the earlier book?that contemporary media, particularly TV, has created an environment in which fictional and cultural experiences are stripped of their real-life referents and instead refer only to one another?Trow examines the Eisenhower years, a period defined by heroic political figures (Ike, Churchill and Adlai Stevenson), commanding cultural institutions (primarily New York's daily newspapers but also movies, books, and television shows) and, personally, by his own intellectual coming of age. Contrasting the American mediascape at mid-century with the quick-cut, high-irony milieu of the late 1990s, Trow argues that the self-referential, overdetermined contemporary media create readers?and more often viewers?defined by severe political and intellectual limits. As always, what distinguishes Trow is not his argument (which sounds many of the same notes as other cultural critics) but his uncommon method. While another writer might mount a dour polemic, Trow is gleefully idiosyncratic. Delving nimbly into journalism, politics, family life and Hollywood image making, he tosses out pyrotechnic mini-analyses of dozens of seemingly random cultural phenomena (Tom Ewell in The Seven Year Itch, Elvis Presley in 1956, Joan Rivers on QVC, Robert Evans's autobiography, Dallas). Somehow, he miraculously cobbles together a coherent overview. Uniquely contentious, full of elastic cultural analogies and beautiful prose, Trow's book is a true original.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1st edition (December 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375401342
• ISBN-13: 978-0375401343
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,417,725 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful. One of a kind., January 7, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: My Pilgrim's Progress: Media Studies, 1950-1998 (Hardcover)

In "My Pilgrim's Progress," George W. S. Trow abandons the impersonal, incantatory voice of his celebrated 1981 essay "Within the Context of No Context" for a free-flowing, deeply intimate act of performance art on the page. If the astounding "No Context" was a late 20th century "The Waste Land", then Trow's newest book is his "Krapp's Last Tape." With razor-sharp wit, brilliant insight, and what can only be described as a broken heart, Trow pours into a tape recorder his analyses of an eclectic series of "Mainstream American Cultural Artifacts" (everything from the front page of the February 1, 1950 edition of The New York Times to the films of Alfred Hitchcock to the documentary "Elvis 56") in order to achieve the possibility of compassion and forgiveness for what he understands to be five decades of personal, cultural, and spiritual "abandonment." The depth of pain and urgency - the life and death personal stakes - behind the author's voice raise what might have been merely a rambling, anecdotal memoir into a work with enormous power. "My Pilgrim's Progress" resonates with the intimacy and significance of a death-bed confession. It is a gut-wrenching, remarkable, "feverish" monologue about our contemporary American history. An extraordinarily moving book.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Elegy for a Midwesterner's Blown Mind, December 25, 1999

By 

Aaron S. Cohn (Collinsville, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: My Pilgrim's Progress: Media Studies, 1950-1998 (Hardcover)

Having been raised by television, it has been pretty hard for me to focus on reality, that is, the human exchanges of power that must have, in the first place, created television (right?). I was born in a sub-suburb in the middle of the midwest, with one or two cultural roots that abruptly stopped after my grandparents, who don't really talk about stuff like cultural roots anyway. Well, then I read Mr. Trow's book and it blew my mind clean off. It did this because it demonstrated to me precisely why it has been so bloody hard to find something in life and language deeper than television and hollywood movies. The linguistic way out of TV and Hollywood was, of course, the liberal arts. But as thrilling, interesting and mysterious as the liberal arts were, I never managed to make them as central a part of my consciousness as is, say, Star Wars. This is why: the liberal arts have always flourished in an environment of cultural connectedness to the flow of history and of real human power in terms of values "deeper" than money. To George Trow, who is perhaps the only real old world Harvard-educated WASP alive who is able to watch television alongside folks like myself--speak both languages, as it were--the liberal arts are visceral. To me they are mostly obscure and dry, with flashes here and there of accessibility. The polyglot author of "My Pilgrim's Progress" showed me, in cruelly stark relief, just what my cultural and lingustic coordinates are on the world-historical grid. For that, I thank him--I think.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In the Conext of George Trow, June 6, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: My Pilgrim's Progress: Media Studies, 1950-1998 (Hardcover)

George Trow pointed out elsewhere, in somebody else's context entirely, that a truly privileged, a privileged-from-birth, person was able to, well, analyze, assimilate, interpret remarkably quickly---quickly enough; that quickly---questions of power and privilege in a way that someone who had merely been stunned by them (someone who hadn't had the "privilege" not to be stunned by them) was not. Trow has the grace and congeniality in "My Pilgrim's Progress" to make clear that he's not as privileged as he might sound, or was not at all privileged in the way the Roosevelts, or even the Eisenhowers (whose cultural shock waves he documents), were. Neither was he irremediably stunned. Since his father's position (as an East Coast journalist of a certain vanished kind) was wiped out at the same time the Roosevelts "disappeared"---as forces to be reckoned with, in government or in ethics---or Eisenhower (a military man who'd sensed something wrong in the military and in the country as early as 1959, '49?), Trow is able to describe, because he's seen, several kinds of illusion at close hand, and a deeply contemporary, deeply American denial. (Call it longing.)

In this book Trow is the same stylist he's always been--with greater or lesser irony--in all his writing. He still plays around with Mrs. Rittenhouse (except she's last year's Mrs. Vanderbilt, or this year's Diana Vreeland). And he still, sometimes, defines his vocabulary while he's first using it in a sentence, or not long before--while you're still catching up. But "My Pilgrim's Progress" (the title goes right back to Louisa May Alcott, and then some) is the clearest and the most self-declaring of any of his satires, essays, "speeches," or plays. And maybe also the funniest. (It would be a trip and a thrill to hear someone reading the entire book out loud.) The origins of "Perhaps you can force me to tell you" (one of the great Trow-satire sentences) are here, but in their own clothes. The 1963 World's Fair makes another appearance, kittycorner to where it clearly was in "Context of No Context." That book's fedora hat is redefined--or refined. Questions of irony and emotion turn out not to have been easy questions in the interim--for any of us.

In short, anyone who worries what some very specific changes---in America, in the media ("hyperactivity," Trow calls this one), in the world---have been doing to our insides (our "selves") should read this book. It's short itself, given all the information--the reporting--that it sums up. It is in no way a "self-help book"; just a very clear diagnosis, no more baffling than any other specialist's. But this specialist is with us in our sense of urgency. He's been trying to take the time; and here he does.