The 60s: The Story of a Decade
Sign in to keep track of books you’ve read and want to read.
The third installment of a fascinating decade-by-decade series, this anthology collects historic New Yorkerpieces from the most tumultuous years of the twentieth century including work by James Baldwin, Pauline Kael, Sylvia Plath, Roger Angell, Muriel Spark, and John Updike alongside new assessments of the 1960s by some of today s finest writers.
Read more
Here are real-time accounts of these years of turmoil: Calvin Trillin reports on the integration of Southern universities, E. B. White and John Updike wrestle with the enormity of the Kennedy assassination, and Jonathan Schell travels with American troops into the jungles of Vietnam. The murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the fallout of the 1968 Democratic Convention, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Six-Day War: All are brought to immediate and profound life in these pages.
The New Yorkerof the 1960s was also the wellspring of some of the truly timeless works of American journalism. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, and James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time all first appeared in The New Yorkerand are featured here. The magazine also published such indelible short story masterpieces as John Cheever's The Swimmer and John Updike's A & P, alongside poems by Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.
The arts underwent an extraordinary transformation during the decade, one mirrored by the emergence in The New Yorkerof critical voices as arresting as Pauline Kael and Kenneth Tynan. Among the crucial cultural figures profiled here are Simon & Garfunkel, Tom Stoppard, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Cassius Clay (before he was Muhammad Ali), and Mike Nichols and Elaine May.
The assembled pieces are given fascinating contemporary context by current New Yorkerwriters, including Jill Lepore, Malcolm Gladwell, and David Remnick. The result is an incomparable collective portrait of a truly galvanizing era.
Advance praise for The 60s: The Story of a Decade
The third installment in the esteemed magazine s superb decades series . . . The contributor list is an embarrassment of riches. . . . The hits continue. Bring on the '70s. Kirkus Reviews(starred review)"
Liked The 60s: The Story of a Decade? Here’s where I’d start.
These suit anyone who liked The 60s: The Story of a Decade. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.
