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This is an interdisciplinary cultural study of the origins of cool in the postwar arts. In jazz, film noir, and existential narrative, cool meant a certain stylish stoicism as projected through attitude, style, language, and artistic sensibility. Cool was a masculine pose, a response to economic trauma, a sign of African-American culture, and a password for rebellion. In the wake of the failure of collective political ideologies, the mask of cool was a physical marker for the recuperation of individualism. African-American cool signaled the rejection of "Uncle Tomming" and found its artistic form in long jazz solos and musicians' blank faces. White male cool was a working-class response to the instability of the Great Depression and found its artistic reflection in film noir. French existential cool was a response to the trauma of Nazi occupation and found its artistic form in the apotheosis of the individual in its literary and philosophical texts.