New York in the 50's

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New York in the 50s is Dan Wakefield's story of a unique time and place in cultural history, when New York City was a hotbed of free love, hot jazz, radical politics, psychoanalysis, and artistic expression. Wakefield found himself in the middle of a world in which anything was possible, and he writes about the era with the keen eye of a historian and the first-hand knowledge and affection of one who lived through a fabled, fertile era. Wakefield enriches his recollections with the first-hand accounts of his ...
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New York in the 50's

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Overview

New York in the 50s is Dan Wakefield's story of a unique time and place in cultural history, when New York City was a hotbed of free love, hot jazz, radical politics, psychoanalysis, and artistic expression. Wakefield found himself in the middle of a world in which anything was possible, and he writes about the era with the keen eye of a historian and the first-hand knowledge and affection of one who lived through a fabled, fertile era. Wakefield enriches his recollections with the first-hand accounts of his friends and colleagues-Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Allen Ginsberg, William F. Buckley, James Baldwin, and others who made New York in the fifties the legend that still exerts such a powerful influence on American life.

A documentary film based on the book will be shown at film festivals in the United States and abroad during 1999. A CD of the musical score, composed and produced by Steve Allee, has been released by AlleyOop Music Publishing.

Wakefield explores a decade in which the "taste, politics, and culture of our society underwent a profound transformation, one that shaped the way we live now." Enriched by the recollections of friends and colleagues who bring their own insights to this book: Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Calvin Trillin, Allen Ginsberg, and others. Photographs.

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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
While Allen Ginsberg howled that the best minds of his generation were being destroyed by madness, Wakefield, who lived in the same town, was high on just being there, on making it as a freelance writer if not yet as a novelist, on the camaraderie he found in Greenwich Village, on hanging around with James Baldwin, Vance Bourjaily, Norman Mailer, Seymour Krim, John Gregory Dunne, Gay Talese, William Buckley and other ``writer writers'' who would later become our eminences grises of letters. Wakefield had fled Indianapolis in 1952 to study at Columbia; yet eight years later, ``all scratched out,'' he would flee New York City--and end up in Boston, permanently. This is his memoir of '50s Manhattan, a charmed, gentle, evocative re-creation of a time when sex was more talked about than done and when done, was done in secret, a time when psychoanalysis was hailed as the new religion, booze was the soporific, Esquire and the Village Voice the journalistic pacesetters, jazz the music. Then the atmosphere changed: McCarthyism hovered, Timothy Leary came around with the ``cure-all elixir'' psilocybin, the Beatles landed. Wakefield, whose novels include Home Free , has written his generation's kinder-spirited Moveable Feast , marking his era as a cultural divide.Litterateurs will treasure the book. So will aspirants. Photos not seen by PW . May
Library Journal
When Wakefield came to New York in 1952 to attend Columbia, the city more than fulfilled his dreams. Over the next 11 years, he finished his degree, began a promising career as a freelance journalist, and made friends with such interesting and diverse people as C. Wright Mills, William F. Buckley Jr., Allen Ginsberg, Norman Podhoretz, James Baldwin, and Norman Mailer. He heard the Clancy Brothers at the White Horse Tavern, Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot, and Jack Kerouac at the Vanguard. He comments here on some of the era's most vital issues, including McCarthyism, civil rights, and psychoanalysis, corroborating his own experience with recollections by Meg Greenfield, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, and others who were on the scene. Wakefield's celebratory memoir, tinged with nostalgia, is highly recommended.-- William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY
Kirkus Reviews
Nostalgia package for the "silent generation" of Eisenhower, a generation that today evidently thinks it was in no way silent. Novelist/journalist Wakefield (Returning, 1988, etc.) arrived in Manhattan as a Columbia student from Indianapolis and was, he tells us, unprepared for the astounding freedom of anonymity that the Upper West Side granted him and for the family feelings he later met with among Greenwich Village bohemians. Younger readers may find these and other memories distant from their own putative needs and, at times, even Wakefield is distant from himself, placing facts from the Sixties back into the Fifties or twice attributing Gordon Jenkins's ghastly musical m‚lange "Manhattan Towers" to Stan Kenton or misquoting Allen Ginsberg's "America." Even so, Wakefield talks with his many friends still alive from the Fifties and gets their take on the era. His interviewees include Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Murray Kempton, Helen Weaver, Joyce Glassman Johnson, Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, Calvin Trillin, Gay and Nan Talese, and many others. For himself, he defines the era nicely with, "Maybe the Village of my generation went from the time Dylan Thomas came to the White Horse [the famed Village tavern where Thomas drank his last drink] to the time Bob Dylan showed up [at the White Horse] that night in 1961 wearing his floppy hat." The liveliest passages here survey jazz joints and players; the explosion of On the Road in 1957 and Wakefield's buttoned-down antipathy to it; changes in sexual mores as the pessary showed up; Esquire's creative breakthrough with New Journalism; and the slime- crawl of McCarthyism over Manhattan liberals. Batches of local color refresh those wholived through a lost age, or what Kempton calls "an age of lead," now become "an age of gold." (Photos—24 pages of b&w—not seen.)
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780395513200
  • Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade & Reference Publishers
  • Publication date: 5/1/1992
  • Pages: 320

Meet the Author

Dan Wakefield is the author of the best-selling novels Going All the Way and Starting Over, both of which were produced as feature films. His novel Under the Apple Tree is now being developed for film. Wakefield's nonfiction works include Returning: A Spiritual Journey and Creating from the Spirit.
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Table of Contents

Introduction: The "Silent Generation" Speaks Out
1. To Grand Central Station
2. Lions and Cubs on Morningside Heights
3. Getting Started
4. Miracle in the Bowery
5. In Spanish Harlem
6. Home to the Village
7. What Rough Beats?
8. Roses, Dreams, and Diaphragms
9. From Joe McCarthy to Jean-Paul Sartre
10. The New World, the Old Dream
11. Graduating to the Five Spot
12. In Exile Till We Come Again
Index
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