The enduring popularity of Polynesia in western literature, art, and film attests to the pleasures that Pacific islands have, over the centuries, afforded the consuming gaze of the west-connoting solitude, release from cares, and, more recently, renewal from urbanized modern life. Facing the Pacific is the first study to offer a detailed look at the United States' intense engagement with the myth of the South Seas just after the First World War, when, at home, a popular vogue for all things Polynesian seemed to echo the expansion of U.S. imperialist activities abroad. Jeffrey Geiger looks at a variety of texts that helped to invent a vision of Polynesia for U.S. audiences, focusing on a group of writers and filmmakers whose mutual fascination with the South Pacific drew them together-and would eventually drive some of them apart. Key figures discussed in this volume are Frederick O'Brien, author of the bestseller White Shadows in the South Seas; filmmaker Robert Flaherty and his wife, Francis Hubbard Flaherty, who collaborated on Moana; director W. S. Van Dyke, who worked with Robert Flaherty on MGM's adaptation of White Shadows; and Expressionist director F. W. Murnau, whose last film, Tabu, was co-directed with Flaherty.