Introduction

In the first half of the twentieth century, a wider range of people came to regard a particular form of intimate and emotional friendship as a crucial component of a good life. More than family, kin or faith, friendship was the social glue of modernity. Friendship helped people to manage, endure and even enjoy dramatic transformations, strengthened the horizontal bonds of age and shared experience, and nourished those who lived beyond sanctioned boundaries. This was particularly true in the cities of the New World, where friendship helped millions of twentieth-century people become modern. Immigrants, travellers and the other more-or-less willing participants in a century of mass movement have relied upon the fact that friends – unlike family or kin – can be made and made again. Friends often opened up the best aspects of modernity, the new pleasures and possibilities of twentieth-century lives. They could also offer a kind of protection against the worst aspects of urban modernity, including the alienation and loneliness so often highlighted by social and cultural observers. To the extent that the twentieth century exposed more people to both the perils and possibilities of change, it also saw their growing reliance upon friendship, and not as some poor relation to community, neighbourhood and kinship, at least in Western societies. Instead, friends were those with whom changes could be experienced, anticipated, enjoyed and savoured.