Possibly the best book ever written about an American magazine editor, this biography offers a 3-D view of the assassinations, the student riots, the counterculture, the politicians, the pop icons and the war that made the 60s America's unforgettable decade. Under the aegis of former Marine Harold Hayes, Esquire helped turn journalists, editors and photographers like Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Raymond Carver, Michael Herr, John Berendt and Diane Arbus into celebrities in their own right. Polsgrove's brilliant book, often resembling an Esquire cover story, offers a warts and all portrait of Hayes. Afterword by Ben Bagdikian.
"The sixties in America was a wild, giddy ride, an amazing Technicolor adventure, and no magazine caught the spirit of its apocalyptic fun as definitively as Esquire. Its brilliant, buccaneering editor Harold Hayes transformed the once-somnolent men's fashion magazine into a literary and cultural proving ground, where pure iconoclasm and blazing talent reigned. Art director George Lois put Sonny Liston on the cover as Santa Claus and Muhammad Ali as St. Sebastian. Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Garry Wills, Michael Herr, and others virtually invented a "New Journalism" equal to the task of deconstructing celebrity, celebrating pop culture, comprehending wars and demonstrations and riots and assassinations. Diane Arbus captured photographic images that reflected a disturbing, hidden America, and fiction writers as diverse as Norman Mailer and Raymond Carver did much the same in words." "Journalist and historian Carol Polsgrove has written the definitive history of this decade-long high-water mark in American magazine journalism."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
V. 1. The colonial book in the Atlantic world: This book carries the interrelated stories of publishing, writing, and reading from the beginning of the colonial period in America up to 1790. v. 2 An Extensive Republic: This volume documents the development of a distinctive culture of print in the new American republic. v. 3. The industrial book 1840-1880: This volume covers the creation, distribution, and uses of print and books in the mid-nineteenth century, when a truly national book trade emerged. v. 4. Print in Motion: In a period characterized by expanding markets, national consolidation, and social upheaval, print culture picked up momentum as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth. v. 5. The Enduring Book: This volume addresses the economic, social, and cultural shifts affecting print culture from Word War II to the present.
The five volumes in A History of the Book in America offer a sweeping chronicle of our country's print production and culture from colonial times to the end of the twentieth century. This interdisciplinary, collaborative work of scholarship examines the book trades as they have developed and spread throughout the United States; provides a history of U.S. literary cultures; investigates the practice of reading and, more broadly, the uses of literacy; and links literary culture with larger themes in American history. Now available for the first time, this complete Omnibus ebook contains all 5 volumes of this landmark work. Volume 1 The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World Edited by Hugh Amory and David D. Hall 664 pp., 51 illus. Volume 2 An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840 Edited by Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley 712 pp., 66 illus. Volume 3 The Industrial Book, 1840-1880 Edited by Scott E. Casper, Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship 560 pp., 43 illus. Volume 4 Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880-1940 Edited by Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway 688 pp., 74 illus. Volume 5 The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America Edited by David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Schudson 632 pp., 95 illus.
Hilda Robinson, artist and grandmother, shares the joys of growing up in a closely-knit African American family and neighborhood. She describes the games she played, the songs she sang, and chores she did long before television was invented.
An account of the emergence of creative nonfiction, written by the "godfather" of the genre In the 1970s, Lee Gutkind, a leather-clad hippie motorcyclist and former public relations writer, fought his way into the academy. Then he took on his colleagues. His goal: to make creative nonfiction an accepted academic discipline, one as vital as poetry, drama, and fiction. In this book Gutkind tells the true story of how creative nonfiction became a leading genre for both readers and writers. Creative nonfiction--true stories enriched by relevant ideas, insights, and intimacies--offered liberation to writers, allowing them to push their work in freewheeling directions. The genre also opened doors to outsiders--doctors, lawyers, construction workers--who felt they had stories to tell about their lives and experiences. Gutkind documents the evolution of the genre, discussing the lives and work of such practitioners as Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Rachel Carson, Upton Sinclair, Janet Malcolm, and Vivian Gornick. Gutkind also highlights the ethics of writing creative nonfiction, including how writers handle the distinctions between fact and fiction. Gutkind's book narrates the story not just of a genre but of the person who brought it to the forefront of the literary and journalistic world.
While the history of the non-violent Civil Rights Movement, from Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King, is one of the great American stories of the twentieth century, the related Black Power movement has taken a more complex path through the nation's history. Formed by a multitude of individuals, the long history of the Black Power movement stretches before and beyond its political manifestations. Beginning with the folk-narratives told on the plantation, Black Power and the American People charts a course through the iconoclasm of the Harlem Renaissance, the battleground of the American campus, the struggle and skill of the Negro Leagues, the drama of the boxing ring, the killing fields of Vietnam and the cold concrete of the penitentiary, right up to the Black Lives Matter movement of the present day. Tracing these connected cultural expressions through time, Black Power and the American People explores the profound legacy of Black Power from its earliest roots to its most futuristic manifestations, its long history in American culture and its profound influence on the American imagination.
. . . In Cold Blood, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The Armies of the Night . . . Starting in 1965 and spanning a ten-year period, a group of writers including Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, John Sack, and Michael Herr emerged and joined a few of their pioneering elders, including Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, to remake American letters. The perfect chroniclers of an age of frenzied cultural change, they were blessed with the insight that traditional tools of reporting would prove inadequate to tell the story of a nation manically hopscotching from hope to doom and back again—from war to rock, assassination to drugs, hippies to Yippies, Kennedy to the dark lord Nixon. Traditional just-the-facts reporting simply couldn’t provide a neat and symmetrical order to this chaos. Marc Weingarten has interviewed many of the major players to provide a startling behind-the-scenes account of the rise and fall of the most revolutionary literary outpouring of the postwar era, set against the backdrop of some of the most turbulent—and significant—years in contemporary American life. These are the stories behind those stories, from Tom Wolfe’s white-suited adventures in the counterculture to Hunter S. Thompson’s drug-addled invention of gonzo to Michael Herr’s redefinition of war reporting in the hell of Vietnam. Weingarten also tells the deeper backstory, recounting the rich and surprising history of the editors and the magazines who made the movement possible, notably the three greatest editors of the era—Harold Hayes at Esquire, Clay Felker at New York, and Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone. And finally Weingarten takes us through the demise of the New Journalists, a tragedy of hubris, miscalculation, and corporate menacing. This is the story of perhaps the last great good time in American journalism, a time when writers didn’t just cover stories but immersed themselves in them, and when journalism didn’t just report America but reshaped it. “Within a seven-year period, a group of writers emerged, seemingly out of nowhere—Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, John Sack, Michael Herr—to impose some order on all of this American mayhem, each in his or her own distinctive manner (a few old hands, like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, chipped in, as well). They came to tell us stories about ourselves in ways that we couldn’t, stories about the way life was being lived in the sixties and seventies and what it all meant to us. The stakes were high; deep fissures were rending the social fabric, the world was out of order. So they became our master explainers, our town criers, even our moral conscience—the New Journalists.” —from the Introduction
Imagine you are watching a movie and suddenly the action stops and the credits begin to roll. Leaving Africa was like that. I had been going along in my African story, full of its sights and sounds and smells'children balancing kerosene tins on their heads, drums rumbling at night, air scented by smoke from charcoal and wood fires. . . And then: Cut. It was over. After twelve years of growing up mostly in West Africa, I was back in the United States, where people thought growing up in Africa was strange and growing up the daughter of missionaries was even stranger. I learned to avoid mentioning that part of my life at all, because if I did, I would feel the stereotypes close round me. I did my best to pass as American without ever quite succeeding. When my mother asked me in her last days, ?Do you appreciate your African childhood? I replied with cruel honesty, ?Yes, but now I don't belong in America.' Just weeks after her death at the age of 96, I sat myself down in a state of survivor's freedom to explore the childhood I had tried to put behind me. I poured out memories across a yellow notepad and began reading the letters Mother had passed on to me'intimate letters she and Daddy had written back to family from Africa, letters I myself had written from my boarding school in Nigeria my last three years there. As a historian I already understood the richness of life told in letters: the way secrets spring from their pages. Thus innocently (if any historian can be said to be innocent) I began'and found myself tangled up in a story I had not just forgotten but had never known.
This book examines the response of American society to the My Lai massacre and its ambiguous place in American national memory. The author argues that the massacre revelations left many Americans untroubled. It was only when the soldiers most immediately responsible came to be tried that opposition to the conflict grew, for these prosecutions were regarded by supporters of the war as evidence that the national leaders no longer had the will to do what was necessary to win.
