Category: 1960

Review of “1960”

Review of 1960 by Rob Baxter: Al Filreis’s 1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern, is a compendium of the belated responses of fiction, poetry, history, painting, sculpture, film television and every medium of art and communication to the language defying...

The Beatniks are crazy

Late 1959. Science Digest summarizes a psychological study done on “beatniks” in San Francisco. It’s another way in which dissent gets pathologized at a time like that (late ’50s—a time of post-McCarthy thaw, a time in which a variety of heretical political positions could be once again taken). Here’s the...

1960: books about Nazis overwhelm shoppers

This drawing illustrates an article published in a 1960 issue of the New York Times about the republication that year of Mein Kamp and the spate just then of books about the Nazis. What’s a bookstore shopper to do? [Click on the image for a larger view.]

Studs Terkel talks with Langston Hughes & others, 1960

Thanks to George Drury and Lois Baum, PennSound has recently added a stunningly good cache of audio recordings from the “Word of Mouth” series, originally aired on WFMT at Loyola University, Chicago. Among these recordings is a conversation among Langston Hughes, John Sellers, James Cotton and Otis Spann, moderated by...