Coney Island

Kasson’s history, “Amusing the Million,” provides a lens through which the reader may view the experiences of Gorky and Lorca at Coney Island. By placing the park in a context of culture, the reader is able to see the tension between diminished Victorian values of productivity in leisure and a new “vigorous, exuberant, daring, sensual, uninhibited, and irreverent” culture that was attracted to such a place (Kasson 6). The new culture was leaving behind objective forms of entertainment such as art, music, theatre, and museums for the subjective leisure at Coney Island that blurred “the lines between spectator and performer”(Kasson 65). This type of experience inspired a total lack of thought in exchange for sensory overload described by Gorky as a badly done version of hell where entrepreneurial demons wait to cast victims into the pit of reckless consumerism. By examining historical and cultural contexts, Kasson’s history allows the reader to understand the perspectives of Lorca and Gorky at Coney Island.