Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940

Advertising the American Dream by Roland Marchand is an influential study of advertising and American culture during the transformative decades between 1920 and 1940. Marchand examines how advertisers responded to rapid urbanization, mass media, changing social values, and growing consumer culture by creating messages that connected products with happiness, security, status, and personal identity.

Drawing extensively on advertisements, radio, magazines, newspapers, photography, and modern art, the book explores how commercial imagery reflected—and helped shape—ideas about the American Dream. Marchand pays particular attention to the ways advertisers addressed social anxieties while promoting what he describes as a developing “consumption ethic.”

A strong choice for readers interested in advertising history, media studies, cultural history, consumerism, marketing, and twentieth-century American society.

Paperback, Very Good. Light cover rubbing and handling wear. The Bookstore stamp on first inside page. Interior otherwise clean and binding sound.