Interesting new £30 history book, Inventing the Egghead: the battle over brainpower in American culture (University of Pennsylvania Press). It ranges from 1900 to the 1960s, and may shed some light on how Lovecraft’s intellectual pursuits would have been viewed in the culture, and how those views changed during his adulthood. Judging from the introduction on Google Books, plenty of attention is paid to popular culture, more than to the discussions of intellectuals in rarified political / elite / university circles.
Chapters 2 & 5 may provide notable historical and cultural context relevant to Lovecraft:
CONTENTS:
Introduction: Or, They Think We’re Stupid [on the recent denigration of George Bush, followed by an overview of the book]
1. “Aren’t We Educational Here Too?”: Brainpower and the Emergence of Mass Culture [Luna Park, Coney Island at the dawn of the 20th century]
2. The Force of Complicated Mathematics: Einstein Enters American Culture [post 1919]
3. Knowledge Is Power: Women, Workers’ Education, and Brainpower in the 1920s [working-class women and education]
4. “The Negro Genius”: Black Intellectual Workers in the Harlem Renaissance
5. “We Have Only Words Against”: Brainworkers and Books in the 1930s [impact of the Great Depression and the New Deal]
6. Dangerous Minds: Spectacles of Science in the Postwar Atomic City
7. Inventing the Egghead: Brainpower in Cold War American Culture
Epilogue
Sadly, there appears to be no audio book or Kindle edition, only a paper hardcover. Why do big publishers waste all the great publicity their initial reviews get, by not simultaneously producing the book in popular and accessible formats? Seriously, I mean a good Kindle edition is pretty easy and cheap to create once you have the book in a standard digital format, and an audio book for 280 pages of plain English is perhaps $1,500 of time from a jobbing actor with a home studio?
has an introduction by Roger Luckhurst. You can preview the intro free, either on Google Books, or via Amazon’s “first 10% free” sample for your Kindle ereader.
