Different Dispatches: Journalism in American Modernist Prose

In Different Dispatches, David T. Humphries brings together a diverse group of well-known American writers of the interwar period, including Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, James Agee, and Robert Penn Warren. For each of these writers, journalism was more than just a training ground or way to include the news of the day. Raising questions about individual perception, social representation, and the values of the marketplace, journalism offered a means for challenging the very bounds of cultural and political representation. Before mass media and celebrity became the stuff of style, journalism promised these writers innovative ways of shaping language while engaging a wide range of readers with new ideas of connection and community. Situating the interwar period in terms of the kinds of journalism that preceded and succeeded it, Different Dispatcheswill be of interest to general readers seeking to understand the importance of these prominent authors, literary scholars grappling with issues of cultural production and reception, and those interested in the impact and history of journalism.