Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945

This is a history never described before — the century and a half of ferment, folly and angst that created a separate Teen Age in Europe and America. We roam London, New York, Paris and Berlin with hooligans and Apaches; explore free love with Rupert Brooke and eternal youth with Peter Pan; we meet flappers and zootsuiters and the Bright Young Things, the unemployoed and the Lost Generation. Meanwhile the book rings with music, from Ragtime to Swing, and the stories come fast and furious, comic, poignant, painfully moving. In 1945, 'the teenager' arrived. This is the story of how we got to that moment. Teenagers--as we have come to define them--were not, journalist Savage tells us, born in the 1950s of rockers and Beatniks, when most histories would begin. Rather, the teenager as icon can be traced back to the 1890s, when the foundations for the new century were laid in urban youth culture. This cultural history charts the spread of the American ideal of youth through England and Europe and around the world. From Peter Pan to Oscar Wilde, Anne Frank to the Wizard of Oz, Savage documents youth culture's development as a commodity and an industry from the turn of the last century to its current driving force in the global economy. Fusing film, music, literature, diaries, fashion, and art, this epic cultural history is a surprising chronicle of modern life sure to appeal to pop culture fans, social history buffs, and anyone who has ever been a teenager.--From publisher description In his previous landmark book on youth culture and teen angst, the award-winning England's Dreaming, Jon Savage presented the "definitive history of the English punk movement" (The New York Times). Now, in Teenage, he explores the secret prehistory of a phenomenon we thought we knew, in a monumental work of cultural investigative reporting. Beginning in 1875 and ending in 1945, when the term "teenage" became an integral part of popular culture, Savage draws widely on film, music, literature high and low, fashion, politics, and art and fuses popular culture and social history into a stunning chronicle of modern life. Following the endless efforts of adults to contain, channel and control youth and the ideals and rebellion of young people determined to make their own way, this work covers two world wars - one which obliterated the dreams of a romantic generation; the other which unleashed the power of America - and the teenager - on the world.