In the late 1930s, the studio system and its ancillary institutions (museums, newspapers, and trade journals) engaged in a concerted effort to narrate the industry’s maturation. This tendency manifested onscreen in the emergence of the historiographical backstudio picture, led by David Selznick’s A Star is Born (1937) and followed by Warners’ Boy Meets Girl (1938) and Fox’s Hollywood Cavalcade (1939). The belief in Hollywood’s coming-of-age gave rise to a countervailing sense that the Hollywood novel had become exhausted. Writers as different as Cedric Belfrage (Promised Land, 1938), Horace McCoy (I Should Have Stayed Home, 1938), and Patsy Ruth Miller (That Flannigan Girl, 1939), among others, used this heightened historical sense to renovate the genre. No renovator was more successful or less understood than Nathanael West. In The Day of the Locust (1939), West contributed to American modernist inscrutability in his occult bildungsroman of painter Tod Hackett. West dared readers to see Tod’s monstrous coming of age alongside the studio system’s own in Tod’s submissions to the order of Hollywood’s aesthetics and the law of the police that rescue him in the novel’s concluding riot.

Scholars have canonically understood Surrealism as having arrived in the Americas in two principal waves: the first involved the interwar discovery of a largely French avant-garde movement by poets, little magazines, and art-world figures in the US and Latin America; the second describes the influx of European “exiles” who crossed the Atlantic as war refugees during World War II. Surrealism was not, however, a solely Parisian or European movement that washed up on American shores. This chapter proposes instead that “Surrealism” designates a multifarious set of poetic and artistic practices invented by and within the Americas, in exchange with European and non-European arts and ideas. The chapter traces some of the refractions and reverberations of Surrealism throughout the Americas, offering a survey of American surrealisms – from Buenos Aires to Fort de France, from Mexico City to Chicago, from Lima to New York City – that disclose a complex set of intercultural reflections and negotiations among modernist poets, artists, and thinkers.