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Shop nowLost Sound
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Learn moreFrom Archibald MacLeish to David Sedaris, radio storytelling has long borrowed from the world of literature, yet the narrative radio work of well-known writers and others is a story that has not been told before. And when the literary aspects of specific programs such as The War of the Worlds or Sorry, Wrong Number were considered, scrutiny was superficial.
In Lost Sound, Jeff Porter examines the vital interplay between acoustic techniques and modernist practices in the growth of radio. Concentrating on the 1930s through the 1970s, but also speaking to the rising popularity of today’s narrative broadcasts such as This American Life, Radiolab, Serial, and The Organist, Porter’s close readings of key radio programs show how writers adapted literary techniques to an acoustic medium with great effect. Addressing avant-garde sound poetry and experimental literature on the air, alongside industry policy and network economics, Porter identifies the ways radio challenged the conventional distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow cultural content to produce a dynamic popular culture.
Jeff Porter is the author of the memoir Oppenheimer Is Watching Me. His essays have appeared in Antioch Review, Isotope, Northwest Review, Shenandoah, Missouri Review, Hotel Amerika, Wilson Quarterly, and Contemporary Literature, among other journals. Porter is an associate professor in English at the University of Iowa.
Arthur Morey has won three AudioFile Magazine “Best Of” Awards, and his work has garnered numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards and placed him as a finalist for two Audie Awards. He has acted in a number of productions, both off Broadway in New York and off Loop in Chicago. He graduated from Harvard and did graduate work at the University of Chicago. He has won awards for his fiction and drama, worked as an editor with several book publishers, and taught literature and writing at Northwestern University. His plays and songs have been produced in New York, Chicago, and Milan, where he has also performed.
Reviews
“War of the Worlds” (1938) by Orson Welles, On a Note of Triumph (1945) by Norman Corwin, and Under Milk Wood (1954) by Dylan Thomas—these are just a few classic programs that stretched the boundaries of how poetic language was first employed in radio, changing how an entire generation heard the world around them. With an air of authority and sophistication, Arthur Morey reads the author’s illuminating deconstructions of seminal works like “Sorry, Wrong Number” (1943), starring Agnes Moorehead, and “The Fall of the City” (1937) by Archibald MacLeish…As Porter points out, the tradition of producing audio stories hasn’t disappeared. It’s simply moved from radio to podcasts and audiobooks.”
“Jeff Porter has brilliantly filled the huge gap on radio’s greatest contributions to twentieth-century American culture.”
“Writing with real beauty, energy, and verve, Jeff Porter has made a significant contribution to our critical understanding of this important medium.”
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