Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

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b. 1925

Comic actor in the best sense of both worlds—who else could convey the naivete o

r Roberts

(Academy Award, 1955), the drag humor of

Some Like it Hot

(1959), the

burnt-out businessperson of

Save the Tiger

(Academy Award, 1973), the confused

patriotism of

Missing

(Best Actor, Cannes, 1982) and so many other roles with such

ersonality and mastery? Lemmon often plays an American everyman, decent and

confounded by a twisted world, whether in comedy or tragedy yet his versatility and

craftsmanship set him apart and earned him American Film Institute Accolades in 1988.

After four decades and multiple

awards,

he continues to delight audiences and won a

Golden Globe for his

television

performance in

Inherit the Wind

(1999).

ee also:

actors

GARY McDONOGH

CINDY WONG

Leno, Jay

late-night television

lesbians

gay and lesbian life and politics

Letterman, David

late-night television

Levertov, Denise

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 656

b. 1923; d. 1997

Anglo-Californian poet and activist, raised in Essex, Levertov’s early verse is “free”

and relatively abstract; later poems are more concrete, yet continue to abjure regularities

of line, stanza and margin. American influences include Black Mountain poets and

Pound, though Levertov’s speakers do not ventriloquize. Her feminist, antiwar teachings

(as with Rukeyser’s) come from lived experience (Hanoi, Berkeley’s People’s Park); her

deepimage fables, elegies, travel transcripts and activist tracts pioneer an American poem

authentically rooted in a specific self. That Levertov’s consistent moral rigor coincides

with formal laxity tests the position that right convictions lead to right poems.

DANIEL BOSCH

Levi Strauss

Founded as a dry-goods company in

San Francisco, CA

(1853) by the German Jewish

immigrant Levi Strauss, this company was transformed by a new process in 1873 that

used metal rivets at stress points in denim work clothes. In the twentieth century these

blue jeans escaped rough work—and playgrounds—to become uniforms for a casual

lifestyle. Although

baby boomers

associated jeans with rebellions against established

codes of dress, by the end of the century a vast variety of denims—in which Levi Strauss

is only one competing brand—have become ubiquitous among all ages, classes and

settings of the US as well as abroad. Levi Strauss, meanwhile, remains one of the largest

privately held family corporations in the United States—a brief fling at public trading in

1971 ended with a 1985 buy back. Its worldwide sales stood at $6 billion in 1998

(slipping markedly from the year before), produced in thirty-two factories worldwide,

with eleven in North America slated to close in 1999. Indeed, Levis, although a symbol

of America, are more likely to be made worldwide in the region where they are

purchased.

GARY McDONOGH

Levittowns

Preplanned, post-Second World War

communities

of low-cost, tract, mass-

manufactured, single-family homes built by Levitt and Sons, Incorporated, which became

worldwide construction models for

suburbs

and edge cities. The first Long Island

Levittown had 17,447 houses. Their purchase, largely by

veterans

using federally

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insured mortgages, marked the beginning of

white flight

from

New York

City.

Restrictive racial covenants

and discriminatory sales practices barred

African

Americans

. For purchasers, Levitt homes fulfilled lifelong dreams. Social critics viewed

Levittowns as harbingers of the quintessential suburban lifestyle, places of monotony

conformity social isolation and bigotry the epitome of Malvina Reynold’s “Little Boxes.”

JAMES KRAUS

Lewis, Carl

track and field

Lewis, Jerry (Joseph Levitch)

b. 1928

Comedian who combines slapstick and sentimentality Lewis became famous

partnering stylish crooner Dean Martin (1917–95) in films like

At War with the Army

(1951) or

The Caddy

(1953). Later films like

The Delicate Delinquent

(1957) and

The

utty Professor

(1961) solidified his boisterous solo comic persona; he later took on

more reflective roles (e.g.

The Kïng of Comedy,

1983). Lewis’ style has divided

American audiences and critics, and he has often gained greater accolades abroad,

especially in France. He has also been extremely active in work with Muscular Dystrophy

although his sentimentalism has come under criticism there as well.

GARY McDONOGH

Lewis, Jerry Lee

b. 1935

Playing piano in seeming reckless abandon, Lewis, along with Chuck Berry, Little

Richard and Elvis

Presley,

is one of the creators of

rock ’n’ roll

. Known by his family

and friends (including televangelist cousin Jimmy Swaggart) as “The Killer” for his

performance technique, Lewis hit Memphis after reading of Presley’s success as a white

R&R singer and recorded “Whole Lot of Shaking Goin’ On” (1957). He followed this

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 658

huge hit with “Great Balls of Fire” (1957). During a tour of England, the press revealed

he had married his thirteen-year-old second cousin; his career suffered until the late

1960s when he made a minor comeback.

EDWARD MILLER

Liberace

b. 1919; d. 1987

Favorite of the “blue-haired” set, this flamboyant pianist was better known for his on-

stage theatrics than his music, mostly romantic period music and popular standards in an

upbeat manner. Bejeweled in flowing sequined robes with his trademark candelabra atop

his grand piano, he bantered with his audience and won their love.

Television

made him

famous and

Las Vegas

kept him in the public eye. Although he was so outrageous,

discussion of his personal or sexual life never seemed to enter the public fray; he once

sued a reporter for stating that he was gay and won. His death from

AIDS,

which he tried

to conceal, helped publicize the disease.

EDWARD MILLER

libraries, public

Creations of cities and states rather than the federal government, public libraries have

been beacons of knowledge and refuges for generations of Americans, from

children

the elderly immigrants and the homeless. Libraries also have been sites of struggle over

materials—

censorship

remains a constant threat—and social division, as segregated

libraries scarred cities of the

South

. Some, like those of

New York

City, NY,

Philadelphia, PA,

Chicago, IL

and

Los Angeles, CA,

have become international

resource centers and architectural monuments to a vision of the city as well as important

public spaces. Others serve towns or small

neighborhoods

with books, meeting places,

educational and career guidance and, increasingly

Internet

access. Public libraries have

earned the deep love of many Americans who treat them as a right to knowledge even as

demands of service, finances and use challenge many systems to maintain their integrity

Libraries vary in origins and extensions. The oldest circulating library in the US, the

Library Company of Philadelphia, for example, was founded by the Junto Society and

Benjamin Franklin in 1731; a public free library was chartered by the city 160 years later

(1891). New York’s Astor Library founded by a merchant philanthropist, merged with

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others to constitute the New York Public Library in 1895.

New Orleans

assembled a

public library with the help of nineteenth-century commercial lenders, while

San

Francisco, CA’s

Board of Supervisors appropriated $24,000 for 6,000 books the public

might read (but not borrow) in 1878–9.

Other libraries grew out of state initiatives: Vermont provided $100 to towns that

would provide a matching $25 in 1896, and the Georgia Public Library there grew up in

stores and homes of a small capitalist town.

Philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) patronized the construction of more than

2,500 library buildings—solid marble palaces with memorials to Western sages constitute

an enduring image of “the library” These buildings housed children’s facilities, reference

services and government documents, as well as public spaces. Their growth has been

linked in turn to the ongoing professionalization of librarians and definitions o

knowledge within an American

community;

libraries created a symbolic

Bill of Rights

against censorship in 1939. Many have faced constant flare-ups about materials on

race,

sex and gender that may be found on children’s and adults’ shelves.

By the 1990s, libraries number over 8,000 nationwide and offer electronic services,

audio-visual materials and reference assistance. This does not mean all are served well.

While some older suburbs have strong systems, others have developed beyond existing

rural facilities and do not find increasing state or local support. In the past, bookmobiles

served outlying communities but now students may rely on schools rather than

community spaces. Urban libraries face constant threats to budgets for staff as well as

books; hours were severely curtailed in the New York system during the city’s financial

crisis.

Libraries also must respond to multiple constituencies in terms of language and

interests: romance readers, civic advocates and high schoolers all have different demands

that may entail scores of items checked out to each client. Books for the blind and

foreign-language collections speak to other visions of citizenship. Electronic resources

constitute a major issue in planning for the future, as they do in

college

and research

libraries. More debates over censorship have been ignited by potential

Internet

access to

objectionable sites.

Further reading

Toth, S. and Coughlan, J. (1991)

Reading Rooms,

New York: Pocket Books, (a

marvelous anthology showing the enduring/endearing place of the library in the

American imagination).

GARY McDONOGH

libraries, research (university and college)

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 660

Like the institutions of which they are a part, university and college libraries have

embodied in their sense of grandeur the loftiest of American educational ideals. As

neoclassical secular temples, gothic cathedrals, Norman castles, Victorian palaces or

outsized utilitarian buildings,

campus

libraries have served as the rhetorical center o

their institutions’ educational program. Organized around a grand reading room with

vaulted ceilings, the library functions as the place at the college where quiet reflection

should yield lofty thoughts. Usually funded at 5 percent of the educational institution’s

overall budget, and named either for the most prominent private donors who have

provided the building funds, or for the institution’s founders or presidents, the library is

that part of the institution that is least controversial.

At least since the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century (and especially after

the Second World War), the numbers of volumes and the miles of shelving have been

rominent markers of the relative ranking of the various university and private/public

research libraries. Since the Second World War, even the biggest buildings have proven

insufficient for storing the entire collection. Many university and some college libraries,

even after numerous building additions and the installation of compact moveable

shelving, have resorted to building or sharing large warehouses off site.

The older East Coast universities, Harvard and Yale, and the two eastern research

libraries, the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library have claimed the

honors as the premier institutions of their kind. The Library of Congress is the largest o

the world’s libraries; Harvard the largest university library collection. These institutions,

as well as their smaller private counterparts in the East and Stanford, the University o

California and the University of Chicago, also amassed large collections of rare books

and manuscripts from Europe, especially after the First World War, when the economic

conditions of postwar life induced the wholesale transfer of cultural capital from the old

world to the new.

The shift of the center of the university and college library world to the

Midwest

has

accelerated after the Second World War. The American Library Association, the leading

national organization of librarians, is in

Chicago, IL,

as is the Center for Research

Libraries, a shared repository for special materials from libraries around the country The

three great libraries at the Universities of Illinois, Michigan and Indiana have been

lavishly supported by their legislatures as a marker of state pride, rivaling their Eastern

counterparts in size of collections. Michigan and Illinois house the country’s premier

library schools, having assumed that mantle from the private institutions, the

University

of Chicago,

which closed its library school in the mid-1980s as did Columbia University

in the mid-1990s.

But it is not just the massive buildings, the great size of collections, measured for more

than one hundred libraries in the millions of units—they are members of a group of large

libraries known as the Association of Research Libraries, which maintains statistics on

relative size of collections, budgets and staffs—that distinguishes American university

and college libraries. Unlike the European models from which they have sprung, the

campus libraries developed a service component that, when successful, merges the ideals

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of the institution with the practice of learning. Professional librarians, trained by the

country’s library schools, have made it a practice to humanize the huge scale of libraries

and the information they contain for the students, faculty and researchers who use them.

The relationship between the individual librarians and their patrons, facilitated by

bibliographic instruction, the creation of step-by-step guides to the use of the collections

and services and the cataloging of materials into subject-specific open-shelf systems has

distinguished American library practice for at least a century Using rubrics developed by

Melville Dewey—the Dewey Decimal System—and the Library of Congress’

Classification and subjectheadings systems, the physical organization of materials by

subject has been the hallmark of the American library.

Electronic information technology came later to the university and college library than

it did to the general US economy but it has profoundly affected research libraries.

Sharing cataloging information was the first step: the United States was the first place

where a standardized record format, the MARC (Machine-readable cataloging record)

format, developed by the Library of Congress in the 1960s, took hold. This prepared the

university and college library community to take advantage of the

Internet,

through the

shared bibliographic utilities of OCLC (Online [first Ohio] Cataloging Library Center),

the largest of its type in the world, and RLIN (the Research Libraries Information

etwork). The technological revolution of the 1990s permitted educational institutions to

extend their walls outward through off-site access to research and undergraduate

collections. This change has been felt most profoundly at the public universities, which

have reached out to new populations through distance-learning programs, made possible

by electronic full-text library collections. The librarians at the private and public

institutions of higher learning have been at the forefront of making the World Wide Web

useable and useful to students throughout the country still applying the same principles o

service and cataloging, large collections and ease of access.

Further reading

Wiegand, W. and Davis, D., Jr.(eds) (1994)

Encyclopedia of Library History,

New York:

Garland.

ELLIOTT SHORE

Library of Congress

libraries, research (university and college); colleges and universities

life cycles/rites of passage

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Biological events and changes of human life are given social meanings through both

rivate reflection and public actions in American culture. From rituals welcoming the

birth

of a child through the fears surrounding

death,

these transitions are celebrated,

acknowledged as points of crisis and stress, and incorporated into

family,

work and

community

. In so far as there is a typical or “model” American life cycle, these

transitions tend to reflect the order of Judaeo-Christian traditions, codified and expanded

by the state and glossed by

consumerism

and marketing. Questions arise, however, when

Americans differ in their recognition and response to life cycles or are unable to

recognize them because of economic insecurity Moreover, rituals and meanings

sometimes seem to fail to respond to changing conditions, like the increasing

complexities of the transition to adulthood or the meanings of an extended period o

mature adulthood, from the fifties into the eighties.

The birth of a child has social, psychological and religious significance for the family

and the community into which the child is born. Rituals and medicine converge in the

pregnancy and birth process, where technology has radically changed issues of

infertility

and control of births since the Second World War. Americans belonging to different

religious and ethnic groups mark this in different ways: through ancestral or generational

names, religious consecration, community celebrations and exchanges of gifts. High

teenage

and single-

irth rates challenge these social celebrations, although the new child

may provide important meanings for the mother, father and network. Public recognition

of adoptions also has been adapted to these formats.

Birthdays, thereafter, remain important individual holidays, although they change over

time. While children expect gifts, parties (and costly entertainment in

suburban, middle-

class

homes), adults may play down these events. Special concern is attached to those

that mark thresholds of a new decade—thirty forty fifty etc. Hence,

sitcoms

joke about

women who celebrate their twenty-ninth birthday repeatedly while banter and pranks

may alleviate the watershed of reaching the big “five-O.”

oming of age

demarcates a second major stage, although there are many variations

on how and when this is marked. Adolescence constitutes an extended component of the

American life cycle where changes are social as well as biological. If adolescence is a

time of multiple recognitions of change, adulthood proves much vaguer in its passages.

American

advertising

and marketing strategies, for example, define distinct demographic

categories of eighteen to twenty-four, twenty-five to thirty-four and thirty-four to fifty; in

popular speech, “twenty-somethings” or young adults or “middle-age” also imply

differences without any clear-cut transition.

Adulthood, in fact, implies a stabilization of social relationships, where the dominant

culture model remains a family. Despite advertisers’ insistence on the importance o

attracting people of the opposite sex, dating and courtship in America do not follow any

single pattern; they are segmented by region, culture, ethnicity

class,

gender and

religion

as well as individual dynamics. Nor do they produce any single outcome. Nonetheless,

roughly 70 percent of the population chooses to live in some form of a family whose

definitions continue to change on the basis of

divorce

and remarriage, as well as

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recognition of many kinds of commitment.

eddings

place civil and, in many cases, religious approval on the union of two

ersons. From the 1950s to the 1990s, the average age of the bride and groom at their

first

marriage

has risen to the middle twenties. Weddings are notable occasions to

display status and wealth. Yet, at this time, approximately 22 percent of the US

population has never married.

Family in turn, has been associated with an independent

home,

especially since

suburban expansion opened new opportunities for the separation of nuclear families from

parents and community Many families also choose to have

children,

who may assure the

continuity of family names, traditions and more. The sitcom model of a detached home,

two photogenic kids, a dog and a station wagon (or

SUV

in the 1990s) masks many

variations in real life. Above all, families have decreased in size—in 1994 the average

family consisted of 3.19 members—and nearly half of all marriages end in divorce.

Family stages are also shaped by work, whether postponed, precluded or adapted to the

increasing demands of families in which all parents work outside the home. Work itsel

rovides a life cycle network for many adults, whether in baby showers or office

romances. Work also produces adult crises, especially amidst the economic divisions and

changes of the postwar period, in which dramatic expansions have been met with

recessions and lay-offs as well as exclusions.

American media have not treated the aging process kindly or with dignity although

most of the country’s discretionary income rests with individuals fifty-five and over,

who, in the early twenty-first century may have decades of life ahead of them. As

baby

boomers

have reached

“middle age,”

they have found themselves caught between the

youth culture they affirmed and negative images of

old age

. Some cultural historians

have identified late middle age, usually in the forties and fifties, as a second adolescence,

a time of significant transition, loss of one’s identity and re-establishment of self as one

considers the inevitability of aging and one’s own death. Since this may reflect diverse

intersections of marriage, work and family (shaped by

race,

gender and

class

), such

transitions are not clearly demarcated socially Instead of celebrating, in fact, many

Americans talk about “midlife” crises, which may draw upon social and cultural features

(especially “youthful” actions and changed appearance) as well as biology (menopause).

Advertising and marketing divide mature adulthood into two stages—fifty to sixty-four

and sixty-five and over—reflecting traditions of the workplace as much as biological or

social changes.

Social Security

has affirmed retirement at sixtyfive as a widespread

milestone. Aging changes the family and household (the “empty nest” as children depart

for

college

and independent life; disposal of a home and relocation). Other critical issues

in these years may include loss of a spouse, adjustments to fixed and reduced incomes,

and

healthcare

issues. Family roles may be celebrated as rites of passage: the new role o

grandparent may provide opportunities for nurturing, while

newspapers

and community

and religious groups will join in the celebration of anniversaries, especially silver

(twenty-five years) and golden (fifty years). Yet loneliness and burdens also arise. Caring

for a spouse during this time may give purpose and direction, for example, but, despite

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 664

medical assistance, it may exhaust the family’s life savings. With individuals living

longer, economic, health, educational, religious, media and marketing strategies continue

to seek and map out the demographic trends that now extend into categories of the “old

old” (those beyond their eighties), a rapidly expanding group.

Choosing how to manage this cycle of life, whether passively or aggressively often

determines the approach to the final stage, dying and death. The American way of dying

is a multibillion-dollar industry building on widespread beliefs in a life beyond human

death. Nevertheless, it is the ultimate passage, irrevocably disrupting family and

community whether it comes at the end of a long and rich life or severs childhood, youth

or young adulthood (taken as unnatural by most contemporary Americans, raised without

local war or epidemics). Grief and mourning may be acknowledged through funeral

rituals; the family and bereaved are encouraged to rely on the support of their friends, but

to get on with life, or the family may divide over the will and disposition of the estate. A

wide variety of public and private memorials—from commemorative monuments and

cemeteries to more personal expressions and souvenirs—negotiate the finality of this

passage.

In most of these experiences and interpretations, Americans scarcely differ from other

global societies who endeavor to make sense of regular and intrusive changes in the lives

of the men and women who compose them. Nonetheless, the diversity of peoples,

expressions and interpretations evoked by these passages and the divergences between

experience and established recognition underscore the complexity and changes o

American culture.

Growth, transitions and rituals in American life have been investigated by social

scientists, pondered by humanists and described in countless works of fiction and

mass

media