Coney Island

Amusing the Million

“His inquiry into the nature and significance of Coney Island . . . provides a brilliant device for understanding major transformations in American culture.” —Warren Susman, Rutgers University Coney Island: the name still resonates with a sense of racy Brooklyn excitement, the echo of beach-front popular entertainment before World War I. Amusing the Million examines the historical context in which Coney Island made its reputation as an amusement park and shows how America’s changing social and economic conditions formed the basis of a new mass culture. Exploring it afresh in this way, John Kasson shows Coney Island no longer as the object of nostalgia but as a harbinger of modernity—and the many photographs, lithographs, engravings, and other reproductions with which he amplifies his text support this lively thesis. “This is what a history of popular culture should be: a delightful account of a fascinating subject and a serious contribution to our understanding of major transition in American culture.” —John G. Cawelti, University of Chicago "Not only delightful reading but a perceptive look at a familiar American institution . . . Social-cultural history ought to be done this way more often.” —Russel B. Nye, Michigan State University “Kasson . . . has vividly recreated the early history of Coney Island, not for nostalgic purposes but in order to say something significant about social and cultural change in turn-of-the-century America.” —William H. Cohn, Winterthur Portfolio

Coney Island

A Coney Island Reader

This literary anthology celebrates the history and romance of Coney Island with works by some of the 19th and 20th centuries’ greatest authors and poets. Featuring a stunning gallery of portraits by the world's finest poets, essayists, and fiction writers--including Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, José Martí, Maxim Gorky, Federico García Lorca, Isaac Bashevis Singer, E. E. Cummings, Djuna Barnes, Colson Whitehead, Robert Olen Butler, and Katie Roiphe—this anthology illuminates the unique history and transporting experience of New York City’s quintessential beach destination. Moody, mystical, and enchanting, Coney Island has thrilled newcomers and soothed native New Yorkers for decades. Its fantasy entertainments, renowned beach foods, world-class boardwalk, and expansive beach offer a kaleidoscopic panorama of people, places, and events that have inspired writers of all types and nationalities. It becomes, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti once wrote, "a Coney Island of the mind."