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The 1950s was one of the most turbulent periods in the history of motion pictures and television. During the decade, as Hollywood's most powerful studios and independent producers shifted into TV production, TV replaced film as America's principal postwar culture industry.

This pioneering study offers the first thorough exploration of the movie industry's shaping role in the development of television and its narrative forms. Drawing on the archives of Warner Bros. and David O. Selznick Productions and on interviews with participants in both industries, Christopher Anderson demonstrates how the episodic telefilm series, a clear descendant of the feature film, became and has remained the dominant narrative form in prime-time TV.

This research suggests that the postwar motion picture industry was less an empire on the verge of ruin—as common wisdom has it—than one struggling under unsettling conditions to redefine its frontiers. Beyond the obvious contribution to film and television studies, these findings add an important chapter to the study of American popular culture of the postwar period.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s fifteen-part poetic cycle Das Marien-Leben stands as his most eloquent meditation on Mary, the mother of Jesus, whose name he shares. Rilke composed these verses in 1912, and ten years later, Paul Hindemith chose to heighten their rhetoric in an expansive song cycle for soprano and piano, the music revised in 1948. The present edition offers a fresh translation of the texts by Christopher Anderson alongside the sensitive artwork of Nishiki Sugawara-Beda, who has fashioned her concept particularly around Hindemith’s music. Supporting essays by translator and artist further situate the work in historical and contemporary contexts. Here is a poetic treasure, less known but no less significant in Rilke’s oeuvre, made accessible to English readers in a unique frame.