To start: only a very few books are currently available that do justice to Levittown. Most of the most interesting and valuable are long out of print. Luckily, libraries and online used book sources keep lively the circulation of those books.
A straightforward, interesting, well-researched history of Levittown, Long Island has yet to be written. There are children's books, puff books, short texts, nostalgic reminiscences, and colorized mock photo-albums, but to get a basic set of facts and ideas, one must start with an archived collection of newspaper articles: Newsday's series from the 50th anniversary of Levittown, originally run in 1947. The newspaper has preserved most of the series as a set of web pages.
The prestigious scholars of the American built environment have included Levittown in brief passages of larger works. One might start with the broadest of these, Gwendolyn Wright's admirable and still-relevant Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983). Dolores Hayden's Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (New York: Vintage Books, 2003) is more recent and more sharply polemical. Much more exhaustive, more centrally focused on Levittown (both authors teach at SUNY Old Westbury, just eight miles from the center of Levittown), more interrogatory and engaging, is Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen's Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened (New York: Basic Books, 2000). This is about as close as one can get to a full scale study of the community, set within a survey of other communities like it, and within the context of social and cultural change in postwar America.
Move to Barbara M. Kelly's Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). It is not a straightforward history of Levittown, but it is perhaps the most thoughtful work done to date on the subject, with a particular focus on the ways residents actually used the houses.
After that, the serious investigator moves into the land of university libraries and public archives, an adventure well worth the effort. The first place to start is with John Liell's influential, though never-published, Ph.D. dissertation from Yale, dating back to 1952: Levittown: A Study in Community Development. Liell did extensive house-to-house surveying, and the results are significant. Harry Henderson's essay, "The Mass Produced Suburbs," Harper's, November 1953, is particularly valuable, as Henderson spoke from his own experience and that of his neighbors.
The primary source materials for Levittown are dispersed and often difficult to find. In my early research (in the early '90s), I went through the files in the Levittown History Room of the Levittown Public Library, which had back issues of the Levittown Eagle and other files. In the late '90s, the Levittown Historical Society moved to a new home within the sprawling Levittown Memorial Educational Center at 150 Abbey Lane in Levittown. There the Society has created a rough-and-ready living history museum with replicas of rooms in the "typical" Levittown house, among other features.
Finally, the best way to immerse oneself is to rifle the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature and the Art Index, starting in 1947 and moving forward, remembering to look for Island Trees in the early years, for William Levitt, for Levitt & Sons, Alfred Levitt, and other less obvious keywords. Architectural journals, Architectural Forum in particular, paid attention to the Levitt projects, and the articles and announcements often contained plans, photographs and drawings. Then the problem becomes, often, actually finding the physical periodicals. Since the advent of digital archives, and the concurrent tragic slash in funding for education and its resources, libraries and archives have steadily de-accessioned their physical archives. McCall's, for example, is almost impossible to find, and so is Collier's; copies of Life can be purchased on ebay, but sitting down and reading through the newsprint and magazine pages of the time is still a revelatory experience.
Many of the pictures I've used have come direct from Levittowners, who sent originals for me to scan and return, or sent their own scans. They also sent their reminiscences, which I then edit and form into historical narrative, return to them for their response, and then add to the site-- a sort of mini-Wikitown. For the more "official" pictures, I've used the Library of Congress's online Prints and Photographs Division, my home-away-from-home since the 1970s; the resources of the Special Collections Library at Northwestern University and Special Collections at the University of Illinois at Chicago; the newly-formed Life.com website, supplemented by the older resource for Time-Life pictures (and still, often, more complete), at Getty Images (gettyimages.com). Purchase of rights to the pictures can be expensive, but browsing through these archives can be an exhilarating experience. My own pictures, of course, are the result of multiple trips, rubbernecking with a map, and they are freely available for all to use, if they credit me and, preferably, this website.
Peter Bacon Hales, 2009