Citizen Cowboy is a probing biography of one of America’s most influential cultural figures. Will Rogers was a youth from the Cherokee Indian Territory of Oklahoma who rose to conquer nearly every form of media and entertainment in the early twentieth century’s rapidly expanding consumer society. Though a friend of presidents, movie stars and industrial leaders, it was his bond with ordinary people that endeared him to mass audiences. Making his fellow Americans laugh and think while honoring the past and embracing the future, Rogers helped ease them into the modern world, and they loved him for it.

From very early on in his career, John F. Kennedy’s allure was more akin to that of a movie star than a presidential candidate. Why were Americans so attracted to Kennedy—his glamorous image, good looks, cool style, tough-minded rhetoric, and sex appeal? JFK and the Masculine Mystique is not just another standard biography of the youthful president. By examining Kennedy in the context of certain books, movies, social critiques, music, and cultural discussions that framed his ascendancy, Watts shows us the excitement and sense of possibility, the optimism and aspirations, that accompanied the dawn of a new age in America.

When Hugh Hefner quit his job at Esquire to start a magazine called Playboy, he didn’t just want to make money, he wanted to make dreams come true. In this wise and penetrating biography, intellectual historian Steven Watts looks at what Hugh Hefner went on to become and how he took America with him. Hefner was one of the most hated and envied celebrities in America, standing just barely on the wrong side of decency—with as many as seven million subscribers to his magazine.

Before Stephen Covey, Oprah Winfrey, and Malcolm Gladwell there was Dale Carnegie, whose book How to Win Friends and Influence People became a runaway best-seller. Self-Help Messiah is the first full-scale biography of the man Life magazine called “one of the most important Americans of the 20th-century.”  Steven Watts tells the fascinating story of Carnegie’s personal journey, from a rural Missouri childhood to world-wide fame as the father of the self-help movement.

The Magic Kingdom sheds new light on the cultural icon “Uncle Walt.” Watts digs deeply into Disney’s private life, investigating his roles as husband, father, and brother and providing fresh insights into his peculiar psyche. Filled with colorful sketches of daily life at the Disney studio and the creation of Disneyland and Disney World, The Magic Kingdom offers a definitive view of one of the most influential Americans of the 20th century.

How a Michigan farm boy became the richest man in America is a classic, almost mythic tale, but never before has Henry Ford’s outsized genius been brought to life so vividly as it is in this engaging and superbly researched biography. Uncovering the man behind the myth, situating his achievements and their attendant controversies firmly within the context of early 20th-century America, Watts has given us a comprehensive, illuminating, and fascinating biography of one of America’s first mass-culture celebrities.

The War of 1812 played a critical role in the emergence of an American “culture of capitalism.” In The Republic Reborn Steven Watts offers a brilliant new interpretation of the war and the foundation of liberal America. He explores the sweeping changes that took place in America between 1790 and 1820—the growth of an entrepreneurial economy of competition, the devlopment of a liberal political structure and ideology, and the rise of a bourgeois culture of self-interest and self-control. Watts writes, “Serving as a vehicle for change and offering an outlet for the anxieties of a changing socity, the War of 1812 ultimately intensified and sanctioned the imperatives of a developing world view.”

Among the leading writers of the early republic, Charles Brockden Brown often appears as a romantic prototype—the brilliant, alienated author rejected by a utilitarian, materialistic American society. In The Romance of Real Life Steven Watts reinterprets Brown’s life and work as a complex case study in the emerging culture of capitalism at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Offering a revisionist view of Brown himself, Watts examines the major novels of the 1790s as well as previously neglected sources.