With the mass mobilization of the US following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, artists of all kinds served in the armed forces or in the war bureaucracy. That doesn’t mean that cultural production stopped. It did, however, mean drastic changes the kind of art that was produced and the ways in which it was disseminated. In short, World War II instigated a dramatic change in the relationship of art to the state. For example, the Library of Congress was established; American publishing was completely overhauled (the first volume of the redoubtable Viking Portable, for instance, was an anthology issued to soldiers); Japanese internment camps had as one of their unintended consequences the opportunity for a new generation of Nisei writers to share and publish their work; American theater saw its boundaries stretched to embrace a wider cross section of the US public; Hollywood and the war department enjoyed a collaboration on mass market as well as training films; refugee intellectuals from Europe congregated in New York and had a remarkable reshaping effect on American culture. The course will follow various streams—mass culture and high culture, film and literature, drama and the visual arts—to explore how new institutions, new cultural producers, and new audiences transformed US culture during the war years.