About the book
The story of a turbulent era, beheld through the lens of a film icon
From the moment Charlie Chaplin appeared on the silver screen in 1914, his rise was meteoric. Within a year, he had become the most famous man on the planet and his tramp the icon of the art form of the twentieth century: the cinema.
The popularity of Chaplin’s small tramp was so overwhelming that he had an enormous influence outside of the cinemas as well. Allied soldiers in both world wars considered him a brother in arms, avant-garde artists him a muse, in the eyes of the Russian revolutionaries he lead the resistance against big industry and for many Americans he was the symbol par excellence of the American dream. Chaplin was, for better or for worse, dragged into the heated social debate of his time and always played his part.
In The Age of Charlie Chaplin, Matthijs de Ridder dazzlingly writes about an artist who managed to embody all of the important themes of the twentieth century. This book is a phenomenal cultural history of a troubled age that determines our view of the world to this day.
