“What Movie Tonight?”: Margaret Thorp between the Aesthetics and the Sociology of American Cinema

Margaret Thorp’s America at the Movies from 1939 offers a wide-ranging contemporaneous account of American movie culture in the period and has thus become an inevitable point of reference for anyone working on classical Hollywood cinema. But the book is more often cited than examined in itself. This essay proposes an in-depth look at the themes of Thorp’s important study and unpacks its fascinating production history and place within her writing career.