Description: This collection of essays, which originally appeared as a book in 1962, is virtually the complete works of an editor of "Commentary" magazine who died, at age 37, in 1955. Long before the rise of Cultural Studies as an academic pursuit, in the pages of the best literary magazines of the day, Robert Warshow wrote analyses of the folklore of modern life that were as sensitive and penetrating as the writings of James Agee, George Orwell, and Walter Benjamin. Some of these essays--notably "The Westerner," "The Gangster as Tragic Hero," and the pieces on the "New Yorker," "Mad Magazine," Arthur Miller's "The Crucible," and the Rosenberg letters--are classics, once frequently anthologized but now hard to find.
Along with a new preface by Stanley Cavell, "The Immediate Experience" includes several essays not previously published in the book--on Kafka and Hemingway--as well as Warshow's side of an exchange with Irving Howe.
Review Quotes: ÝWarshow's¨ writing on film remains remarkably fresh...ÝHe¨ wrote so well because he wrote so honestly about how movies affected him...ÝHe¨ was unusually gifted in registering the emotional impact of such genres as the western and the gangster film, which he correctly saw as the myths of our society...Although movie-going is a solitary act, many critics write as if they are members of a gang, trying to please some clique or ideology outside the movie theater. Warshow refused to do this; he distrusted theories or methods that denied the immediacy of the movie-going experience. Because he remained true to his own response, and recorded these responses with great eloquence, his writing remains alive, against all odds. -- Jeet Heer "National Post" (01/11/2002)