Popular Culture
USS San Pablo, the vessel in Richard McKenna's well-known novel The Sand Pebbles (1962), set in 1926, was modeled on the USS Villalobos, a 31-year old vessel originally captured from Spain. McKenna served aboard one of the newer river gunboats a decade after the time frame of his novel, as did William Lederer, the author of The Ugly American (1958). The film The Sand Pebbles was based on the book.
New York Times and Wall Street Journal best selling author, W.E.B. Griffin places the main character of his book "Semper Fi" within the Yangtze River Patrol. The opening chapters of this book provide an in depth illustration of both the mission and everyday life of United States Marines assigned to the Yangtze Patrol during the 1930s.
Kemp Tolley, an officer who served as executive officer of the Tutuila in the 1930s, wrote a well-received history, Yangtze Patrol.
Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe of the United States Marine Corps is a protagonist and POV character in Neal Stephenson's epic Cryptonomicon. He opens the novel as a member of the Yangtze River Patrol.
Read more about this topic: Yangtze Patrol
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle- class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)