Aging Moderns

What happens when the avant-garde grows old? Examining a group of writers and artists who continued the modernist experiment into later life, Scott Herring reveals how their radical artistic principles set out a new path for creative aging.

Scott Herring is professor of American studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Yale University. His books include The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture (2014), Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism (2010), and Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History (2007).

Heather K. Love, University of Pennsylvania:
Aging Moderns challenges both the modernist cult of youth and a pervasive ageism in the culture. Arriving at late modernism via the later life of modernists, Herring rewrites literary history while taking his readers on a fascinating journey through archives and community centers. A remarkable demonstration of criticism as care.

Sari Edelstein, author of Adulthood and Other Fictions: American Literature and the Unmaking of Age:
With Aging Moderns, Scott Herring recasts the credo of modernist studies and urges us instead to “make it old.” This magnificent book makes a compelling and urgent case for how a focus on old age and aging challenges entrenched understandings of the period and its aesthetics. Grounded in dazzling archival research, Aging Moderns is a profoundly ethical book that redefines collaboration, creativity, and, ultimately, the very conception of modernism.

Wai Chee Dimock, author of Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival:
With groundbreaking research and fierce dedication, Scott Herring gives us a modernism never seen before: flourishing decades after its supposed high point, featuring authors in late life unfazed by bodily afflictions. Still intensely experimental, this is a new and different avant-garde, all the more stunning for being unexpected.

Rachel Adams, author of Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery:
Scott Herring combines new archival research, interviews, and innovative literary analysis in a book that transforms the way we think about aging, modernism, and artistic production. Eloquent, witty, and lucid, Aging Moderns is also a great read.