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 and/or culture:
“There is a continual exchange of ideas between all minds of a generation. Journalists, popular novelists, illustrators, and cartoonists adapt the truths discovered by the powerful intellects for the multitude. It is like a spiritual flood, like a gush that pours into multiple cascades until it forms the great moving sheet of water that stands for the mentality of a period.”
—Auguste Rodin (1849–1917)
“The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)