Half title -- Series Page -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Ordinary Families, Popular Culture, and Popular Democracy, 1935-1945 -- Radio's Formula Drama -- Popular Theater and Popular Democracy -- Popular Democracy on the Radio -- Popular Democracy in Wartime: Multiethnic and Multiracial? -- Representing the Soldier -- The New World of the Home Front -- Soldiers as Veterans: Imagining the Postwar World -- Looking Back Stories -- 2. Making the Working-Class Family Ordinary: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn -- From Working-Class Daughter to Working-Class Writer -- Revising 1930s Radical Visions -- Remembering a Working-Class Past -- Instructing the Middle Class -- The Ethnic and Racial Boundaries of the Ordinary -- Making Womanhood Ordinary -- Hollywood Revises A Tree Grows in Brooklyn -- The Declining Appeal of Tree's Social Terrain -- 3. Home Front Harmony and Remembering Mama -- "Mama's Bank Account" and Other Ethnic Working-Class Fictions -- Remembering Mama on the Stage -- The Mother Next Door on Film, 1947-1948 -- Mama on CBS, 1949-1956 -- The Appeal of TV Mama's Ordinary Family -- Trading Places Stories -- 4. Loving Across Prewar Racial and Sexual Boundaries -- Lillian Smith and Strange Fruit -- Quality Reinstates the Color Line -- Strange Fruit as Failed Social Drama -- The Returning Negro Soldier, Interracial Romance, and Deep are the Roots -- Interracial Male Homosociability in Home of the Brave -- 5. Seeing Through Jewishness -- Perception and Racial Boundaries in Focus -- Policing Racial and Gender Boundaries in The Brick Foxhole -- Recasting the Victim in Crossfire -- Deracializing Jewishness in Gentleman's Agreement -- 6. Hollywood Makes Race (In)Visible -- "A Great Step Forward": The Film Home of the Brave -- Lost Boundaries: Racial Indeterminacy as Whiteness -- Pinky: Racial Indeterminacy as Blackness.

Trading Places or No Way Out? -- Illustrations -- Everyman Stories -- 7. Competing Postwar Representations of Universalism -- The "Truly Universal People": Richard Durham's Destination Freedom -- The Evolution of Arthur Miller's Ordinary Family -- Miller's Search for "the People," 1947-1948 -- The Creation of an Ordinary American Tragedy: Death of a Salesman -- The Rising Tide of Anticommunism -- 8. Marital Realism and Everyman Love Stories -- Marital Realism Before and After the Blacklist -- The Promise of Live Television Drama -- Paddy Chayefsky's Everyman Ethnicity -- Conservative and Corporate Constraints on Representing the Ordinary -- Filming Television's "Ordinary": Marty's Everyman Romance -- 9. Reracializing the Ordinary American Family: Raisin in the Sun -- Lorraine Hansberry's South Side Childhood -- Leaving Home, Stepping "Deliberately Against the Beat" -- The Freedom Family and the Black Left -- "I Am a Writer": Hansberry in Greenwich Village -- Raisin in the Sun: Hansberry's Conception, Audience Reception -- Frozen in the Frame: The Film of Raisin -- Visions of Belonging -- Notes -- Index.