During the first half of the 20th century, an “intellectual migration” relocated thousands of artists and thinkers to the United States, including some of Europe’s supreme performing artists and makers of film, theater, and ballet. America proved a destination both strange and opportune. A “foreign homeland” (Thomas Mann), it would frustrate and confuse, and yet afford a clarity of understanding unencumbered by native habit and bias. However inadvertently, the condition of cultural exile would promote acute inquiries into the American experience.

Featuring the stories of George Balanchine, Kurt Weill, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Greta Garbo, and Marlene Dietrich, Exiles in America shows how these famous newcomers forever changed American culture—and were changed by it as well.