Before cool became something to buy, wear or perform, it was an attitude. 

In Birth of the Cool, poet and cultural historian Lewis MacAdams traces the emergence of one of the twentieth century's most influential cultural sensibilities, moving between jazz clubs, experimental art, literature, underground film and the restless intellectual life of postwar America.

Beginning with the artistic experiments of Marcel Duchamp and the revolutionary improvisations of jazz musicians, MacAdams follows the people who helped transform cool from a marginal sensibility into a defining feature of American culture. Jackson Pollock, Miles Davis, Jack Kerouac, Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young and the Beat writers appear alongside the painters, filmmakers and cultural outsiders who rejected conventional respectability in favour of experimentation, spontaneity and new ways of living.

The book explores how artistic innovation emerges through friendships, rivalries, chance encounters and the circulation of ideas between seemingly unrelated disciplines. Particularly compelling is MacAdams's attention to cool as something more complicated than fashion: a response to authority, an aesthetic of detachment, and an attempt to create freedom within the social and political constraints of its time. 

Simon & Schuster, 2002. Paperback. Good condition, with light shelf wear and minor rubbing to the covers.