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The Art of American Sophistication | The New Yorker

newyorker.com · 3,121 words · saved by 1 readers

How striving, self-invention, and charm became America’s national style.

The prompt, let’s say, is “American sophistication.” What does it make the L.L.M. in our heads, trawling the riverbed of our old reading and viewing, produce? Whom do we think of first? Fred Astaire, I suspect, still comes to mind as the exemplar, even among many of those who know him only from stills or streaming. And, if we have a rudimentary knowledge of who he was and where he came from, we can begin to discern a larger pattern: he was not a New Yorker but a Midwesterner, a boy from Omaha, Nebraska, pushed along by a strenuous stage mother, the son of an Austrian Jewish father. His…

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