Research Catalog

Title

Gates of Eden : American culture in the sixties / Morris Dickstein ; with a new introduction by the author.

Author

Dickstein, Morris.

Publication

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1997.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xxv, 301 p.; 21 cm.

Summary

During 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.

Subject

United States > Civilization > 1945-

Note

• Originally published: New York : Basic Books, c1977.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Prologue : Allen Ginsberg and the sixties -- Cold War blues : politics and culture in the fifties -- The rise of a new sensibility, or how the fifties broke up -- Black humor and history : the early sixties -- The working press, the literary culture, and the new journalism -- Fiction at the crossroads : dilemmas of the experimental writer -- Epilogue : remembering the sixties, surviving the seventies.

ISBN

0674341554 (pbk.)

LCCN

^^^97023295^

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library