What do you think?
Rate this book
My Pilgrim's Progress: Media Studies, 1950-1998
"Original, provocative and possibly prophetic."-- The New York Times
When his classic Within the Context of No Context was first published, George W. S. Trow parsed television's overwhelming dominance over America's consciousness. In My Pilgrim's Progress , he returns with a provocative tour of politics and the media to show "how 1950 got to be 1998."
The son of a tabloid journalist, Trow was raised in the "Deepest Roosevelt Aesthetic," and found himself seduced by the ordinaryness of the Eisenhower era. It was a time when the Old World was giving way to the New. Perusing The New York Times of February 1950, he gives us America at the peak of its power, with its politicians and celebrities (and the nearly hesitant advent of television) and the fresh terror of the H-bomb. At turns a cultural history, a eulogy, and a provocative commentary on contemporary America, My Pilgrim's Progress confirms Trow's place as one of our most brilliant and incisive social critics.
When his classic Within the Context of No Context was first published, George W. S. Trow parsed television's overwhelming dominance over America's consciousness. In My Pilgrim's Progress , he returns with a provocative tour of politics and the media to show "how 1950 got to be 1998."
The son of a tabloid journalist, Trow was raised in the "Deepest Roosevelt Aesthetic," and found himself seduced by the ordinaryness of the Eisenhower era. It was a time when the Old World was giving way to the New. Perusing The New York Times of February 1950, he gives us America at the peak of its power, with its politicians and celebrities (and the nearly hesitant advent of television) and the fresh terror of the H-bomb. At turns a cultural history, a eulogy, and a provocative commentary on contemporary America, My Pilgrim's Progress confirms Trow's place as one of our most brilliant and incisive social critics.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
2 people are currently reading
147 people want to read
About the author
George W.S. Trow
11 books16 followersGeorge W. S. Trow lives in Columbia Country, New York and Texas.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 15, 2013
Denser and less engaging (and possibly belated) epilogue/continuation of the mood of "Within the Context of No Context." For real "No Context" fans only.
August 25, 2010
Wow.
I read this book because it was on the online list created by David Shields (Reality Hunger, The Thing about Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead: www.themillions.com/2010/05/all-great...) and my college roommate and reading companion Larry said it was great. Boy was he right about that.
Trow begins by positing something he calls the Dominant Mind, a mind-set created by and yet reflected in the media. It’s kind of a “Give ‘em what they want” sort of thing but not entirely. There’s a synergy involved. He then goes on to describe how the Dominant Mind in our country – and hence, the world – has changed since World War II, during which he was born. He does this by assuming that after the war New York City became the media capital of the world, and here’s why: Europe, the various cities of which may previously have been same, was in ruins. Russia was being ruled by a lunatic and anything that came out of the Soviet Union was pure bullshit, totally designed to discredit the Western, i.e, democratic, way of life.
Please note that Trow goes to great lengths to explain that he doesn’t believe the U.S. was by any means the cultural capital of the world. That was still Europe and would continue to be for some time.
Back to the media: He begins by dissecting the New York City newspapers of 1950, which then embodied the Dominant Mind, and explains how each one was geared to appeal to a different audience and how journalism in general works. This in itself is fascinating and worth the price of the book. Then he explains, by examining what he calls “cultural artifacts,” such as movies, how the Dominant Mind was beginning to change, most especially because of the appearance of television, from a New York Times sort of mentality to a New York Post sort of mentality. What others might describe as a paradigm shift — a term coined by Thomas Kuhn in his famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and that’s been egregiously overused and almost always misapplied. In this case it’s appropriate.
Trow maintains that television was designed strictly as a sales medium and to appeal to kids and has changed very little since its inception — in fact it’s probably even gotten worse. So we’ve gone from the serious, fact-laden media of the Times to what he calls the Tabloid Mind of the Post. In other words, the Dumbing Down of American Culture.
This is not “new” in the sense that intellectuals everywhere are constantly complaining about it and have been for years. But Trow shows us, using his life and the people he knew — he grew up in New York City, is the son of a tabloid journalist and is/was a journalist himself — and examining the personalities of the people in power — Roosevelt and Eisenhower, in particular — how and why it all happened. He doesn’t just whine and throw up his hands in despair like everyone else. And he does it all intelligently, insightfully, and, best of all, convincingly.
I see only two problems with the book: (1) He maybe leans a little too heavily on the “There is properly no history; only biography” idea, as Emerson put it. It’s otherwise known as the “Great Man” theory of history — i.e., history is created by certain individuals and the rest of us are pawns in their power-plays or, if we’re really lucky, merely spectators. I don’t think Trow seriously believes that, I think he seriously believes in democracy and the power of the individual — you know, “The Common Man” — but sometimes it sounds like maybe not. (2) He wrote the book in 1998, before the Internet really caught fire, and he mentions that maybe it’s the next Dominant Mind template but seriously doubts it. Obviously he was wrong about that but, back then, he was merely making an educated guess and admits it. So we can’t seriously fault him for not being a seer.
He is, however, most definitely a media sage. Read this book if you’re interested in media studies and especially if you’re interested in New York City. It’s simply fabulous.
I can’t wait until he writes a book about the Internet.
I read this book because it was on the online list created by David Shields (Reality Hunger, The Thing about Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead: www.themillions.com/2010/05/all-great...) and my college roommate and reading companion Larry said it was great. Boy was he right about that.
Trow begins by positing something he calls the Dominant Mind, a mind-set created by and yet reflected in the media. It’s kind of a “Give ‘em what they want” sort of thing but not entirely. There’s a synergy involved. He then goes on to describe how the Dominant Mind in our country – and hence, the world – has changed since World War II, during which he was born. He does this by assuming that after the war New York City became the media capital of the world, and here’s why: Europe, the various cities of which may previously have been same, was in ruins. Russia was being ruled by a lunatic and anything that came out of the Soviet Union was pure bullshit, totally designed to discredit the Western, i.e, democratic, way of life.
Please note that Trow goes to great lengths to explain that he doesn’t believe the U.S. was by any means the cultural capital of the world. That was still Europe and would continue to be for some time.
Back to the media: He begins by dissecting the New York City newspapers of 1950, which then embodied the Dominant Mind, and explains how each one was geared to appeal to a different audience and how journalism in general works. This in itself is fascinating and worth the price of the book. Then he explains, by examining what he calls “cultural artifacts,” such as movies, how the Dominant Mind was beginning to change, most especially because of the appearance of television, from a New York Times sort of mentality to a New York Post sort of mentality. What others might describe as a paradigm shift — a term coined by Thomas Kuhn in his famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and that’s been egregiously overused and almost always misapplied. In this case it’s appropriate.
Trow maintains that television was designed strictly as a sales medium and to appeal to kids and has changed very little since its inception — in fact it’s probably even gotten worse. So we’ve gone from the serious, fact-laden media of the Times to what he calls the Tabloid Mind of the Post. In other words, the Dumbing Down of American Culture.
This is not “new” in the sense that intellectuals everywhere are constantly complaining about it and have been for years. But Trow shows us, using his life and the people he knew — he grew up in New York City, is the son of a tabloid journalist and is/was a journalist himself — and examining the personalities of the people in power — Roosevelt and Eisenhower, in particular — how and why it all happened. He doesn’t just whine and throw up his hands in despair like everyone else. And he does it all intelligently, insightfully, and, best of all, convincingly.
I see only two problems with the book: (1) He maybe leans a little too heavily on the “There is properly no history; only biography” idea, as Emerson put it. It’s otherwise known as the “Great Man” theory of history — i.e., history is created by certain individuals and the rest of us are pawns in their power-plays or, if we’re really lucky, merely spectators. I don’t think Trow seriously believes that, I think he seriously believes in democracy and the power of the individual — you know, “The Common Man” — but sometimes it sounds like maybe not. (2) He wrote the book in 1998, before the Internet really caught fire, and he mentions that maybe it’s the next Dominant Mind template but seriously doubts it. Obviously he was wrong about that but, back then, he was merely making an educated guess and admits it. So we can’t seriously fault him for not being a seer.
He is, however, most definitely a media sage. Read this book if you’re interested in media studies and especially if you’re interested in New York City. It’s simply fabulous.
I can’t wait until he writes a book about the Internet.
June 30, 2023
Herein a deepening and maturation of the vision laid out in within the context of no context. That work’s aphoristic beat-driven pacing is replaced by a series of interlocking essays with an elegant structural logic. I read this many years ago and was not especially into it; now, I don’t recognize that self.
Trow is not a theorist or a philosopher; he’s a deep reader of culture, social historian, and elegiac declinist autobiographer—a Tiresias of media gestalt and explicator of individual symptomatologies of social change. It’s fun and devastating field work in support of theorists like Philip Rieff and Kit Lasch. But he’s a better read: unsurprisingly, given how much more interesting than causes are effects.
To the extent that he is theorizing—limning a schema for What Went Wrong—I don’t care much whether it’s true or it’s false. He was in the limo with James Taylor, and in the club with Diana Vreeland. He knew people who knew people who knew Roosevelts. Trow evokes the real animal fault lines of imitation, identification, and longing that give rise to culture. It’s a lot of bleak fun and the rhythms of his prose are powerful. Who else could coin a term like “deutero-Hemingway,” or riff like this about a weird moment Joan Rivers had on a cable shopping network?
I’m going to relate this now to the agreement we all have that industrial society never quite cohered. It was a great experiment, it was a new way for all of us to live together in a more regimented way on the one hand, but in a more anonymous way on the other. That was always the trade-off. Yes, you worked in an assembly line; no, you didn’t have to report to the county parson. In the process of trying it—during our seventy-year experiment with industrial society—all the credibility, all the believability, all the trance, in a sense, all the closure of agricultural, hierarchical life disappeared, but industrial society didn’t cohere. So now we have— a clean slate. Nothing—or a clean slate, it is up to us. We are, at long last, the existential men and women that Heidegger and Sartre so we would necessarily become. And that was what was getting to Joan: “My God, I don’t understand.”
Trow is not a theorist or a philosopher; he’s a deep reader of culture, social historian, and elegiac declinist autobiographer—a Tiresias of media gestalt and explicator of individual symptomatologies of social change. It’s fun and devastating field work in support of theorists like Philip Rieff and Kit Lasch. But he’s a better read: unsurprisingly, given how much more interesting than causes are effects.
To the extent that he is theorizing—limning a schema for What Went Wrong—I don’t care much whether it’s true or it’s false. He was in the limo with James Taylor, and in the club with Diana Vreeland. He knew people who knew people who knew Roosevelts. Trow evokes the real animal fault lines of imitation, identification, and longing that give rise to culture. It’s a lot of bleak fun and the rhythms of his prose are powerful. Who else could coin a term like “deutero-Hemingway,” or riff like this about a weird moment Joan Rivers had on a cable shopping network?
I’m going to relate this now to the agreement we all have that industrial society never quite cohered. It was a great experiment, it was a new way for all of us to live together in a more regimented way on the one hand, but in a more anonymous way on the other. That was always the trade-off. Yes, you worked in an assembly line; no, you didn’t have to report to the county parson. In the process of trying it—during our seventy-year experiment with industrial society—all the credibility, all the believability, all the trance, in a sense, all the closure of agricultural, hierarchical life disappeared, but industrial society didn’t cohere. So now we have— a clean slate. Nothing—or a clean slate, it is up to us. We are, at long last, the existential men and women that Heidegger and Sartre so we would necessarily become. And that was what was getting to Joan: “My God, I don’t understand.”
June 17, 2007
You should be clear about this: You don’t read George Trow so much as you listen to him. In My Pilgrim’s Progress: Media Studies 1950-1998, the former staff writer for The New Yorker so much as admits that all he’s doing is talking into a tape recorder. He talks (and talks and talks), then he transcribes, and what results -- for you, the patient reader, who is recommended to sip a beer while listening -- are often long, meandering, sometimes absurd, other times brilliant observations.
Case in point: “The other day I had a thought, and then after I had the thought, I thought, Well, this can’t possibly be true, and then I thought about it some more, and it was. True, that is. And my thought was, Well, the president of the United States and the secretary of state, Mr. Clinton and Ms. Albright, don’t have any idea of the power base of Dwight Eisenhower—what it was, socially. Well, you might say, what does that matter? My answer to that comes in two parts . . .”
Actually, his answer to that comes in an entire volume, and if it reads like the longest conversation over a beer you’ve ever had, then it’s also one of the most energetic, insightful and downright thrilling.
Case in point: “The other day I had a thought, and then after I had the thought, I thought, Well, this can’t possibly be true, and then I thought about it some more, and it was. True, that is. And my thought was, Well, the president of the United States and the secretary of state, Mr. Clinton and Ms. Albright, don’t have any idea of the power base of Dwight Eisenhower—what it was, socially. Well, you might say, what does that matter? My answer to that comes in two parts . . .”
Actually, his answer to that comes in an entire volume, and if it reads like the longest conversation over a beer you’ve ever had, then it’s also one of the most energetic, insightful and downright thrilling.
March 7, 2016
In "My Pilgrim's Progress," George W. S. Trow abandons the impersonal, incantatory voice of his celebrated 1981 essay "Within the Context of No Context" for a free-flowing, deeply intimate act of performance art on the page. If the astounding "No Context" was a late 20th century "The Waste Land", then this is “Krapp's Last Tape." With razor-sharp wit, brilliant insight, and what can only be described as a broken heart, Trow’s analyzes an eclectic series of "Mainstream American Cultural Artifacts" (everything from the front page of the February 1, 1950 edition of The New York Times to the films of Alfred Hitchcock to the documentary "Elvis 56") in a struggle towards compassion and forgiveness in the face of what he considers five decades of personal, cultural, and spiritual "abandonment." The depth of pain and urgency - the life and death personal stakes - behind the author's voice raises what might have been merely a rambling, anecdotal memoir into a work of enormous power. "My Pilgrim's Progress" resonates with the intimacy and significance of a death-bed confession. It is a gut-wrenching, remarkable, "feverish" monologue about our contemporary American history. An extraordinarily moving book.
September 11, 2020
not as good as trow's "context of no context" book, but loads of insights about how the media and culture game have evolved over time...and many of his predictions turned out to be right on the money, too. an essential book for folks interested in cultural history/criticism
May 26, 2008
wow, the first 100 pages blew me away. i admire the steam of consciousness diatribe. like having a really great conversationalist friend who just ever so slightly goes off the rails.
March 12, 2013
Trow was one of the very best stylists of our time, and funny, and deeply perceptive.
May 23, 2009
The ravings of an obsessed, brilliant lunatic... a voice like none other.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews