The cultural front

The Cultural Front explores a powerful social movement in the 1930s that generated what writer Michael Gold called a 'second American Renaissance.

' Denning argues that this movement, part of the broader Popular Front, was a grassroots social movement that sparked a cultural renaissance in American culture.

He highlights the role of working-class Americans, emigres, and racial minorities in this renaissance, and how the movement 'proletarianized' American culture through literature, film, music, and other forms of mass culture.

The book also examines the demise of the cultural front due to the anticommunist crusade of the early Cold War and its lasting impact on American society and culture.