The Immediate Experience

Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Other Aspects of Popular Culture

Robert Warshow

With an introduction by Lionel Trilling and a new preface by Stanley Cavell

    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.

  • Cover: The Immediate Experience
  • A photo of the author

Robert Warshow (1917-1955) was a member of the community that has come to be known as the "New York Intellectuals." He was an editor of Commentary magazine and an astute critic of cinema. He tragically died of a heart-attack at the age of 37.

At the time of his death in 1975, Lionel Trilling was University Professor at Columbia University.

Stanley Cavell is Walter M. Cabot Professor, Emeritus, of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Harvard University.