The Sound of the Good Neighbor: Radio, Realism, and Real Estate

Two defining cultural events revealed radio’s aesthetic and political impact on the United States in 1938: Orson Welles andThe Mercury Theater of the Air’s infamous Halloween night broadcast ofWar of the Worldson CBS, and the publication of John Dos Passos’sU.S.A.trilogy. Already a national celebrity when he appeared on the cover ofTimemagazine in 1936 to celebrate the publication of the trilogy’s final book,The Big Money, by 1938, when the trilogy appeared in print as a single bound copy, Dos Passos was heralded by Sartre as “the greatest writer of our time.”¹ However,U.S.A.’s