The 60s : the story of a decade
(Book)

The 1960s, the most tumultuous decade of the twentieth century, were a time of tectonic shifts in all aspects of society--from the March on Washington and the Second Vatican Council to the Summer of Love and Woodstock. No magazine chronicled the immense changes of the period better than The New Yorker. This capacious volume includes historic pieces from the magazine's pages that brilliantly capture the sixties, set alongside new assessments by some of today's finest writers. 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 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 Yorker of the 1960s was also the wellspring of some of the truly timeless works of American journalism. Truman Capotes In Cold Blood, Rachel Carsons Silent Spring, Hannah Arendts Eichmann in Jerusalem, and James Baldwins The Fire Next Time all first appeared in The New Yorker and are featured here. The magazine also published such indelible short story masterpieces as John Cheevers The Swimmer and John Updikes 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 Yorker of 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 Yorker writers, including Jill Lepore, Malcolm Gladwell, and David Remnick. The result is an incomparable collective portrait of a truly galvanizing era.