Teenage Confidential: An Illustrated History of the American Teen

by Michael Barson and Steven Heller

Book Overview

When did those awkward, tormented creatures known as teenagers first crawl out of the primordial ooze and into American culture? Believe it or not, they didn't always exist. It was not until World War II, with grown men off fighting and grown women working in factories, that adolescents were left idle and unsupervised long enough to wreak havoc. In the forties, fifties, and sixties a new breed of youth evolved -- the juvenile delinquent -- and this...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811815846
• ISBN13: 9780811815840
• Release Date: October 1997
• Publisher: Chronicle Books
• Length: 132 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 8.6" x 11.1"

Customer Reviews

terrific refutation to those who think anything has changed

This is a fantastic compilation of American adults' images of teenagers in those so-pure 1930s, '40s, and '50s showing (in my view) what a warped perspective grownups display toward adolescents. This book should be a text in modern film and sociology classes, where the first exercise can be: "find the Latino" and "find the African American." More than dry treatises, the visuals in this book show that America's so-called adults in this century have maintained an irrational terror of teenagers that speaks to the awful, anti-youth climate of the '90s as much as the latest newspaper headline-lie. Highly recommended.