A leading scholar of 20th-century American literature, film, literary criticism, and popular culture, Dickstein's work has appeared in both the popular press and academic journals, including The New York Times Book Review, Partisan Review, TriQuarterly, The New Republic, The Nation, Harper’s, New York Magazine, Critical Inquiry, Dissent, The Times Literary Supplement, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Slate, and Bookforum.
[7] Initially thinking he would become a journalist or lawyer, during his sophomore year at Columbia Dickstein read Jacques Barzun’s Teacher in America and Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination.
Published in 2009 by W.W. Norton & Company, Dickstein's cultural history of the U.S. in the 1930s considers the complicated dynamic between art and entertainment in the decade, suggesting that the era produced a wide array of popular culture that shares an interest in how “ordinary people lived, how they suffered, interacted, took pleasure in one another, and endured.”[10] A sizable portion of Dancing in the Dark focuses on what is typically thought of as "escapist" entertainment from the decade.
The book is filled with extended analyses of the decade's most popular sorts of entertainment: the musicals of Busby Berkeley, the performances of Humphrey Bogart, the films of Frank Capra, and the dance routines of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
He identifies the “strong radical undercurrents that led directly to the culture wars of the 1960s” through a close examination of the “stream of outsider figures who would do more than anything else to define the character of postwar writing”:[12] Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Norman Mailer, and Jack Kerouac, among others.
Authors of popular literary fiction in the 1950s, these writers expressed deeply felt cultural anxieties about conformity, race, technology, and patriarchy, even as the culture-at-large was in the midst of unparalleled economic prosperity.