Simply Adorno
Born in Frankfurt am Main as the only child of a businessman father and a mother who had been a professional singer, Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) was a child prodigy who could play Beethoven at the age of twelve and developed his nonconformist political views not much later. Throughout his life, he continued to pursue both his musical interests and his groundbreaking work in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and sociology. With the rise of Nazism, Adorno was forced into exile in 1934, spending four years at Oxford before relocating to the U.S., where he lived first in New York, then in Los Angeles, joining the group of German émigrés that included Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, and the composer Arnold Schoenberg. In 1949, Adorno returned to Germany; a few months later, his landmark work of social psychology, The Authoritarian Personality, was published. For the next 20 years, until his death in 1969, he helped define postwar political culture and intellectual life in West Germany, including confronting the legacy of National Socialism that continues to haunt the country to this day.
In Simply Adorno, Professor David Jenemann introduces Adorno’s multifaceted writings and multiple lives through a few key texts, emphasizing his undiminished relevance and the acuity of his insights about modern life. Without oversimplifying Adorno’s ideas or the complexity of his life, he nonetheless provides a clear and thoroughly engaging primer that acquaints the reader with Adorno’s intellectual accomplishments and his unflagging commitment to free thought.
As writer Alex Ross observed, Theodor Adorno was one of the first people to see American life as a kind of reality show. Through his analysis of authoritarianism and conformity in his own time, Adorno uncannily predicted our own. For anyone interested in the development of 20th-century thought, or wanting a better understanding of how we came to be where we are today, Simply Adorno is essential reading.
About the author
David Jenemann is the dean of the University of Vermont Honors College and professor of English and Film and Television Studies. He is the author of the books Adorno in America (2007) and The Baseball Glove: History, Material, Meaning, and Value (2018) and has written numerous articles and essays on critical theory and intellectual and cultural history.
