The Kennedy Obsession: The American Myth of JFK

by John Hellmann

Overview

John F. Kennedy was not only a president, but also a symbol for America's most cherished ideas. In The Kennedy Obsession, John Hellmann takes a thoroughly original approach to understanding Kennedy's star power and his carefully crafted public image. Tracing Kennedy's self-creation as diligent scholar, bashful hero, and sensitive rebel-cued by cultural figures such as Lord Byron, Ernest Hemingway, and Cary Grant-and the images of Kennedy in the aftermath of his assassination, Hellmann reveals the painstaking transformation of private life into public persona, of a man into perhaps the major American myth of our time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231107990
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	03/19/1999
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	0.54(w) x 6.00(h) x 9.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

John Hellmann is professor of English at the Ohio State University at Lima and the author of American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam and Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction.

Table of Contents

Prologue: A Bedside Visit
1: How Kennedy Awoke: Jack's Reading and Why England Slept
2: John Hersey's "Survival": A Literary Experiment and Its Political Adaptation
3: The Old Man and the Boy: Papa Hemingway and Profiles in Courage
4: The Hollywood Screen and Kennedy's Televised Showdown with Truman
5: The Erotics of a Presidency
6: An Assassination and Its Fictions

What People are Saying About This

John Carlos Rowe

An admirably focused and clear study... Among the huge number of encyclopedic studies of JFK, The Kennedy Obsession will stand out as readable, focused, and relevant to our understanding of American culture in the 1950s and 1960s.

— John Carlos Rowe, author of At Emerson's Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature

Thomas A. Kazee

Hellmann argues provocatively that this American heroic epic was not an incidental by-product of Kennedy's eventful and dramatic life.

— Thomas A. Kazee, Davidson College

Editorial Reviews

Hellmann understands that reading involves more than the consumption of ideas—it is a theater of the mind, in which the reader imaginatively tests a range of roles, voices, identities. Hellmann shows how Kennedy's own early reading (in combination with family lore) provided him with the language of myth, his sense of identity and role. He then analyzes the complex ways in which this private myth-making interacted with the process of social myth-making (in mass media and politics) to shape 'The Kennedy Obsession.'

Richard Slotkinn University

Hellmann understands that reading involves more than the consumption of ideas—it is a theater of the mind, in which the reader imaginatively tests a range of roles, voices, identities. Hellmann shows how Kennedy's own early reading (in combination with family lore) provided him with the language of myth, his sense of identity and role. He then analyzes the complex ways in which this private myth-making interacted with the process of social myth-making (in mass media and politics) to shape 'The Kennedy Obsession.'

American University - Richard Slotkin

Hellmann understands that reading involves more than the consumption of ideas—it is a theater of the mind, in which the reader imaginatively tests a range of roles, voices, identities. Hellmann shows how Kennedy's own early reading (in combination with family lore) provided him with the language of myth, his sense of identity and role. He then analyzes the complex ways in which this private myth-making interacted with the process of social myth-making (in mass media and politics) to shape 'The Kennedy Obsession.'

— Richard Slotkin

American University

An admirably focused and clear study . . . Among the huge number of encyclopedic studies of JFK, The Kennedy Obsession will stand out as readable, focused, and relevant to our understanding of American culture in the 1950s and 1960s.

John Carlos Rowe

Hellmann understands that reading involves more than the consumption of ideas—it is a theater of the mind, in which the reader imaginatively tests a range of roles, voices, identities. Hellmann shows how Kennedy´s own early reading (in combination with family lore provided him with the language of myth, his sense of identity and role. He then analyzes the complex ways in which this private myth-making interacted with the process of social myth-making (in mass media and politics to shape "The Kennedy Obsession."

Richard Slotkin

Hellmann argues provocatively that this American heroic epic was not an incidental by-product of Kennedy´s eventful and dramatic life.

Thomas A. Kazee

It deserves to be read by anyone with an interest in the political culture of the Kennedy era and our own.

Gary Owens

Hellmann (English, Ohio State U.-Lima) examines the myth and legend of the assassinated US president as a careful self- construction. He documents how as child Kennedy loved stories of British knights and maidens, how as an adult he modeled his public image on movie stars rather than other politicians, and how he sought to embody the triumph of youth. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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