1947
Showing 37 works across all media from 1947
A Streetcar Named Desire
Blanche DuBois arrives at her sister's New Orleans apartment with nothing left, and her brother-in-law Stanley sets about destroying what remains. No American play has staged desire and cruelty this nakedly.
The Plague
Rats die in the streets of an Algerian port, the gates shut, and a doctor named Rieux keeps working. Camus meant the German occupation, and every epidemic since has proved him right.
If This is a Man and The Truce
Levi was an Italian chemist deported to Auschwitz at twenty-four. He survived, then spent months making his way home across a ruined Europe, and reports all of it without raising his voice.
The Diary of a Young Girl
Two years in hiding behind an Amsterdam office, set down by a girl who wrote about her mother, her boredom, and who she meant to become. She was fifteen when they were found.
Under the Volcano
Drinking himself to death in Mexico, a British ex-consul is visited by the wife who left him. Lowry gives them one Day of the Dead, written from inside the bottle.
Round Midnight
Monk wrote it around 1940, cutting it for Blue Note in 1947; no jazz composer's tune is recorded more.
La Vie en Rose (Edith Piaf)
Piaf's own lyric, dismissed by her collaborators as foolishness, then a million American sales and a French national possession.
Out of the Past
If you want to know what film noir means, this is the film people hand you: a gas station owner's past arrives in the form of a woman he once found.
Icarus
A black figure with a red dot for a heart falls through blue, cut from paper because Matisse could no longer stand at an easel.
Fortress Besieged
Fang Hongjian returns to wartime China with a mail-order diploma and no plan. Qian gave Chinese its image of the besieged life: those outside the fortress want in, those inside want out.
Critique of Everyday Life
Capitalism's real conquest is not the factory but the ordinary day, Lefebvre argues: the commute, the meal, the weekend. He sent a generation of radicals looking for revolution in daily routine.
The Gallery
Occupied Naples, 1944: soldiers and civilians trading cigarettes, sex, and rumor under the arcade. Burns writes Americans who understand nothing of the country they hold, and a bar where gay soldiers breathe.
One, Two, Three ... Infinity
Gamow carries a reader from counting to infinity, from atoms to the expanding universe, drawing every illustration himself. The psychologist Steven Pinker traces his science writing to reading this as a boy.
Thoughts on Design
Beauty and utility generate each other, Paul Rand argues, and the designer's job is fusing idea with image. He pulled European modernism into American advertising and made the trade take design seriously.
Goodnight Moon
In the great green room a rabbit says goodnight to the moon and the quiet old lady whispering hush, while the pictures darken page by page until the child hearing it is asleep.