Inside U.S.A. (USA) by John Gunther
Trade Paperback.
The seventy-fifth anniversary edition of Gunther’s classic portrait of America!
“Inside U.S.A. is far from a panegyric. Gunther listed ‘the worst American characteristics—covetousness, ignorance, absence of aesthetic values, get-rich-quickism, bluster, lack of vision, lack of foresight, excessive standardization, and immature and undisciplined social behavior.’ America was still ‘an enormously provincial nation,’ he wrote. ‘I do not know any country that is so ignorant about itself.’ Have we improved noticeably in the half century since?” —Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,The Atlantic Monthly
John Gunther’s Inside series were among the most popular books of reportage of the 1930s and 1940s. For Inside U.S.A., his magnum opus, Gunther set out from California and visited every state in the country, offering frank, lucid, and humorous observations along the way in what legendary publisher Robert Gottlieb, writing in the New York Times, calls Gunther’s “fluent, personal, casual, snappy” voice. Gunther’s insights on race, labor, the impact of massive New Deal public works projects, rural life, urbanization, and much more yield fascinating insight into life in a postwar America that had vaulted into the status of the world’s preeminent superpower.
This seventy-fifth-anniversary edition of Inside U.S.A. provides an invaluable picture of America as it was and is both a delight to read and filled with insights that remain deeply relevant today.