Featured Faculty Publications
Recent Books By Graduates
Nineteenth-Century Literature

Other Affiliated Publications
Comitatus
European Romantic Review
Renaissance Quarterly
Viator

Martha Banta's
Taylored Lives
Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford

Scientific management: Technology spawned it, Frederick Winslow Taylor championed it, Thorstein Veblen dissected it, Henry Ford implemented it. By the turn of the century, practical visionaries prided themselves on having arrived at "the one best way" both to increase industrial productivity and to regulate the vagaries of human behavior. Nothing escaped the efficiency craze, and in this vivid, wide-ranging book, Martha Banta explores its effect on the culture at large.

To the Taylorists, everything needed tidying up: government, business, warfare, households, and, most of all, the workplace, with its unruly influx of strangers into the native scene. Taylored Lives gives us a striking sense of what it was like to live, work, love, and die when time, motion, and emotions were checked off on worksheets and management charts. Canvasing the culture, Banta shows how the cause of efficiency was taken up in narratives of every sort--in mail-order catalogs, popular romances, newspaper stories, and personal testimonials "from below," as well as in the canonical works of writers from Henry Adams and William James to Sinclair Lewis, Nathanael West, and William Faulkner. The strategies of impassioned theorists and hands-on practitioners affected the kinds of narratives produced in the controversy over the pros and cons of the management culture; they bear an eerie resemblance to the means by which we today, storytellers all, keep trying to make sense of our own chaotic times.

This interdisciplinary work charts the development of a managerial culture from its start in the steel mills of Pennsylvania through its spread across the American experience in an interlocking series of social systems and everyday practices. Banta scrutinizes narrative strategies employed by "inscribers" as diverse as Josephine Goldmark, Theodore Roosevelt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anzia Yezierska, Richard Harding Davis, Booker T. Washington, and Theodore Dreiser; by Taylor himself, as well as Veblen and Ford; by women who toiled on the factory floor; by writers of dream-copy for ready-made houses; and by Buster Keaton in his silent treatment of the dysfunctional honeymoon home.

With its historical scope and its provocative readings of assorted narratives, this richly illustrated book offers a complex and disturbing picture of a period, as well as invaluable insights into the way theorymaking continually makes and breaks cultures. A remarkable work, Taylored Lives confirms Martha Banta's place as one of our leading cultural and literary critics.

Martha Banta is professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author or editor of several books, including Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History.

"Martha Banta's Taylored Lives is that rare achievement, a thoroughly accessible--yet extremely sophisticated--interdisciplinary inquiry. The book looks into the narrative patterns that structured American lives at work and at home and that shaped American social and cultural identities. In both its own pattern of organization and its textured readings of such diverse cultural artifacts as ready made house plans and immigration policies, Banta's study is impressively imaginative. This is a major contribution to the field of American studies from one of its most articulate voices."

--Donald A. McQuade, University of California at Berkeley

 149 Humanities Building • Box 951530 • Los Angeles • CA 90095-1530
 Tel: 310.825.4173  Fax: 310.267.4339
 © 2007 UC Regents