This course looks at the cultural life of New York City in a decade of extraordinary transformation. The 1940s were the years when New York became a dominant center of global power and widely regarded as the capital of the world. It was also an era when the city was at the leading edge of deep transformations in social geography, urban form, and political and cultural life that would soon come to characterize much of the United States. We will discuss the way these and other factors made New York in the 1940s a seedbed of the great artistic and intellectual movements of the latter half of the 20th century. Our main focus will be on the era’s literary culture, but we will also touch on drama, philosophy and criticism, painting (including surrealism and abstract expressionism), photography, classical music and jazz, and dance.