美国文化Culture of the United States

Culture of the United States

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

This article is about the high culture and popular culture of the United States. For customs and way of life, see Society of the United States.

The development of the culture of the United States of America—music, cinema, dance, architecture, literature, poetry, cuisine and the visual arts— has been marked by a tension between two strong sources of inspiration: European sophistication and domestic originality.[citation needed]

American music can be heard all over the world, such as through Channel V, VH1 and by singers such as Jimi Hendrix, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Charlie Parker, Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis, BB King, The Doors and The Ramones; American films and television shows are also very popular[citation needed], including icons like Star Wars, The Godfather, Schindler's List, Titanic and The Matrix; American sports figures are widely known, such as Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Venus Williams, Mike Tyson, Muhammad Ali and Michael Johnson; and American movie actors and actresses are widely recognized such as Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Marilyn Monroe, Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Cruise.[citation needed]This is in very stark contrast to the early days of the American republic, when the country was generally seen as an agricultural backwater with little to offer the culturally advanced world centers of Europe and Asia.[citation

needed] At the beginning of her third century, nearly every major American city offers classical and popular music; historical, scientific and art research centers and museums; dance performances, musicals and plays; outdoor art projects and internationally significant architecture.[citation needed] This development is a result of both contributions by private philanthropists and government funding.[citation needed]

[edit] Literature

Main article: Literature of the United States

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, American art and literature took most of its cues from Europe. Writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau established a distinctive American literary voice by the middle of the nineteenth century.[citation needed]Mark Twain and poet Walt Whitman were major figures in the century's second half; Emily Dickinson, virtually unknown during her lifetime, would be recognized as America's other essential poet.[citation needed] Eleven U.S. citizens have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, most recently Toni Morrison in 1993. Ernest Hemingway, the 1954 Nobel laureate, is often named as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.[1] A work seen as capturing fundamental aspects of the national experience and character—such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(1885), and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby(1925)—may be dubbed the "Great American Novel". Popular literary genres such as the Western and hardboiled crime fiction were developed in the United States.

[edit] Comic books

Main article: American comic book

Since the invention of the comic book format in the 1930s, the United States has been the leading producer with only the British comic books (during the inter-war period and up until the 1970s) and the Japanese manga as close competitors in terms of quantity.[citation needed]

Comic book sales began to decline after World War II, when the medium was competing with the spread of television and mass market paperback books. In the 1960s, comic books' audience expanded to include college students who favored the naturalistic, "superheroes in the real world" trend initiated by Stan Lee at Marvel Comics. The 1960s also saw the advent of the underground comics. Later, the recognition of the comic medium among