From the author of the critically acclaimed England's Dreaming, a landmark cultural history of youth

Teenagersas we have come to define themwere not, award-winning author Jon Savage tells us, born in the 1950s of rockers and Beatniks, when most histories would begin. Rather, the teenager as icon can be traced back to the 1890s, when the foundations for the new century were laid in urban youth culture.

Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture is a monumental cultural history that charts the spread of the American ideal of youth through England and Europe and around the world. From Peter Pan to Oscar Wilde, Anne Frank to the Wizard of Oz, Savage documents youth culture's development as a commodity and an industry from the turn of the last century to its current driving force in the global economy. Fusing film, music, literature, diaries, fashion, and art, this epic cultural history is an astonishing and surprising chronicle of modern life sure to appeal to pop culture fans, social history buffs, and anyone who has ever been a teenager.

"Although popular assumption might place the birth of teenage culture alongside the rise of rock 'n' roll in the 1950s, Savage (England's Dreaming) traces a more elaborate backstory that extends into the late 19th century. His catalogue of influences and indicators bounces from Goethe and Rimbaud to teenage girls' diaries, but the account only begins to pick up steam at the end of the First World War, as a generation of British youth reject the values of the elders who sent them into battle. Later, in the U.S., Prohibition not only taught booze-loving college students disrespect for the law, it put them in contact with a criminal underground that strengthened their subversive tendencies. The analysis of teen culture during the Second World War is particularly strong, moving from the Hitler Youth and rebellious ' swing kids' in Germany to the Zoot Suit riots of Los Angeles and the 'Zazou' movement of occupied Paris. Savage weaves his disparate sources into a convincing narrative of how adolescents were molded by political and cultural pressures into the consumer-friendly category of ' teenager' by the end of WWII, but while individual anecdotes carry some verve, the writing never fully sheds its dry academic tone." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"British journalist Jon Savage tackles a big subject in 'Teenage': 'the quest, pursued over two different continents and over half a century, to conceptualize, define, and control adolescence.' He ends precisely where many readers would expect him to begin, in 1945 when teenagers who achieved new independence while their parents contended with World War II were unleashed on an economy bursting with... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) consumer demand pent-up for more than a decade by economic depression and wartime rationing.

In Savage's view, it was the 70 years before 1945 that shaped a hitherto amorphous stage of life into a self-conscious cohort of young men and women no longer willing to defer to their elders. So he begins his study in the 1870s with teenage diarist Marie Bashkirtseff and 15-year-old murderer Jesse Pomeroy, who were both, Savage writes, 'harbingers of a new intermediate state that as yet had no name. ... They forced their respective societies to recognize that the existing rituals between childhood and adulthood were obsolete.'

It's a wonderfully provocative opening, followed by an avalanche of fascinating material. The author examines the changing ideas about youth manifested in books from 'Peter Pan' and 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' to 'Rebel Without a Cause.' He details the origins and aims of movements as different as the Boy Scouts and the German Wandervogel. He investigates popular music embraced by teens from ragtime to swing, dance steps that appalled adults from the turkey trot to the jitterbug. He looks at fashions through which young people expressed their defiance: the brass-tipped clogs worn by British 'hooligans' in the 1890s, the short skirts and bobbed hair of Jazz Age flappers, the zoot suits Mexican American pachucos flaunted in the early 1940s. He shows the media simultaneously deploring and exploiting unruly adolescents in its lurid coverage, from Jacob Riis' menacing 1890 photo of 'A Growler Gang in Session' to prurient articles about 'khaki-wacky' Victory Girls picking up GIs.

Through it all, Savage demonstrates, worried grown-ups debated how to deal with these baffling beings, no longer children but not yet adults, while teenagers increasingly insisted on being accepted on their own terms. The author follows a number of historical developments that spotlighted the particular issues of youth. In the 19th century's rapidly growing cities, with their festering slums and total lack of a social safety net, poor kids unsupervised or abandoned by their desperate parents ran wild in the streets. Yet while authorities were decrying 'juvenile delinquency' and suggesting various means of instilling self-discipline, capitalist industries were creating a new consumer economy that 'enshrined the transitory enthusiasms of adolescence': this week's hit movie or hot gramophone record, this season's flashy clothes, often deliberately marketed to the young.

Consumerism accelerated after World War I, when an embittered, cynical generation embraced hedonism as the best way to express its contempt for the 'old men' who had sent millions of young men to die on the battlefields of Europe. In Germany, reeling from its defeat, the Nazis deliberately targeted adolescents as the malleable material from which they would create the master race. Savage's narrative traces a consistently conflicted adult attitude: the belief that the young embodied the future, coupled with the fear that they were uncontrollable. With Hitler Youth, the Nazis aimed to control the young and the future.

It would be nice to report that 'Teenage' is as coherently organized and argued as it is stimulating. Instead, while you can't help but admire the author's ambition, you do wish he'd bitten off less and chewed more. In particular, the tangled interconnection between adolescence and consumerism, a subject about which Savage has obviously thought a great deal, requires much more careful treatment than he gives it here. References to 'the American dream economy' and 'social control through consumerism' are scattered about without being fully developed. Readers with orderly minds will be bothered by questions of precision and inclusion. The Neo-Pagans and the Bright Young People were in their 20s, not teenagers, and surely the Italian fascists deserve more than a cursory mention, since the author himself notes that their theme song was 'Giovinezza' ('Youth').

Such flaws and inconsistencies are understandable, even partly defensible. (Presumably, Savage is employing sociologist G. Stanley Hall's expansive definition of adolescence as extending from around 12 to 25, for example, though he never says so.) But they're all characteristic of a text that should have been better focused.

Nonetheless, there's so much pleasure and insight to be gained from these turbulent pages that it would be churlish to complain at length about their failings. Savage's evocative, exuberant chronicle overflows with ideas it will probably take a dozen writers a decade to work out in more rigorous books. It's safe to say that none of them are likely to be as marvelous or maddening as this one.

" Reviewed by Kevin Allman, a frequent mystery reviewerJames A. Miller, who is chairman of the American studies department at George Washington University.Carolyn See, who can be reached at www.carolynsee.comPatrick Anderson, whose e-mail address is mondaythrillers(at symbol)aol.comWendy Smith, author of 'Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940.', Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Fusing film, music, literature, diaries, fashion, and art, this epic cultural history from the author of "England's Dreaming" is an astonishing and surprising chronicle of modern life sure to appeal to pop culture fans.

Jon Savage is the author of the celebrated England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond, winner of Rolling Stone's prestigious Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award. He has written widely for American and British newspapers and magazines on music, pop culture, and social history.