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What is American Culture?—You Asked Series
3 MINUTE READ
April 10, 2016

Fans of the late crime novelist Stieg Larsson tour Sweden in search of Hedestad, the quaint town featured in Larsson’s popular mystery series. Though it flourished in America, the detective novel continues to defy cultural boundaries. ©AP Images
Fans of the late crime novelist Stieg Larsson tour Sweden in search of Hedestad, the quaint town featured in Larsson’s popular mystery series. Though it flourished in America, the detective novel
continues to defy cultural boundaries. ©AP Images

American culture no longer belongs to America, and in truth it never did. Different types of American pop culture have roots in other cultures’ traditions: Musical comedy owes its provenance to European opera; jazz came out of New Orleans by way of the Caribbean and, before that, Africa; and the trail of detective fiction winds back through the quintessentially British Sherlock Holmes to Poe’s oddly French Inspector Dupin, to Dickens’ Inspector Bucket from Bleak House.

(Pamphlet, 2 pgs.)

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