ABOUT THIS BOOKDuring the sixties, says Morris Dickstein, America seemed to be at the gates of Eden--verging on a new way of experiencing life, art, and culture. In this provocative book, he discusses how we reached the gates and why, in the end, they remained closed.Beginning with Allen Ginsberg and the Beat poets of the late fifties, Dickstein traces the rise of a new sensibility in American thought, writing, and music through lively and incisive analyses of such sixties icons as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Bob Dylan, Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, Joseph Heller, Paul Goodman, Norman O. Brown, and the Rolling Stones.Now, on the twentieth anniversary of the book's original publication, Dickstein has written a new introduction, reassessing the period's achievements and failures, and providing a fresh perspective on the ways that the sixties continue to influence our politics and culture.
REVIEWSA vivacious, highly original work, combining literary criticism, political commentary... and candid personal testimony.
-- Walter Clemons Newsweek
With excellent literary judgment and judicious sympathy [Dickstein] covers politics and culture... the `new journalism,' fiction, rock music, black writing and black nationalism, and concludes with an autobiographical sketch that nicely reveals the relationship of the observer to the things observed.
-- Christopher Lasch New York Times Book Review
A vital and important book for anyone who wants to know the intricate and sometimes explosive connections between culture and politics in the sixties.
-- Richard Poirier