{ Notes }

Introduction

1. Kyle Gann, No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 191; John Cage, in conversation with Daniel Charles, For the Birds (Boston: Marion Boyars, 1981), 104.

2. On the event, see Martin Duberman, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 372–77.

3. Kristine Stiles, “Burden of Light,” in Chris Burden, ed. Fred Hoffman (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Locus+, 2007), 30–31.

4. Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965), xvii.

5. Susan Sontag, “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Picador, 1990), 303.

6. Richard Poirier, “The Aesthetics of Radicalism,” Partisan Review 41, no. 2 (1974), 193–94. Also Poirier, The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages of Contemporary Life (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992). This period saw the famous definition of fame from historian Daniel J. Boorstin, “The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness,” a definition that Warhol certainly understood in relation to his “superstars.” Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961; repr., New York: Vintage, 1992), 57.

7. Douglas Barzelay and Robert Sussman, “Interview with William Styron,” in Conversations with William Styron, ed. James L. W. West III (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 103.

8. Lucy R. Lippard, Pop Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 99.

9. On the escapades of the Living Theatre, see Aldo Rostagno withJulian Beck and Judith Malina, We, The Living Theatre (New York: Ballantine, 1970).

10. For the quotes on happenings, see Allan Kaprow, The Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 62, 8. Such a blurring did not sit well with all critics, for example, Michael Fried, who disdained theatricality in the arts. See his famous essay “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5 (Autumn 1967), 12–23. On happenings as critique, see Judith F. Rodenbeck, Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), xiii. On the genre, and some of its earliest expressions, see Michael Kirby, Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1965). Also indispensable is the lavishly illustrated volume by Mildred L. Glimcher, Happenings: New York, 1958–1963 (New York: Monacelli, 2012).

11. Marshall Berman, All that Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 319.

12. Richard Gilman, The Confusion of Realms (New York: Random House, 1969).

13. Benjamin DeMott, “The Age of Overkill,” New York Times Sunday Magazine (19 May 1968), 77; Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (New York: Random House, 1966), 187.

14. John Gruen, The New Bohemia (New York: A Capella, 1990), 14.

15. Walter Kerr, The Decline of Pleasure (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962), 41; Claes Oldenburg, quoted in Max Kozloff, “The New American Painting” in The New American Arts, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Horizon, 1965), 111; Sontag, Against Interpretation, 14; Robert Motherwell, The Collected Writings, ed. Stephanie Terenzio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 150.

16. Michael S. Sherry, Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imaginary Conspiracy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Christopher Bram emphasizes how writing was a key vehicle for gays in Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America (New York: Twelve, 2012). On the contested nature of masculinity in this period, see James Gilbert, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Gore Vidal, Myra Breckinridge (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1969), n.p. Perhaps Myra’s desire became reality for rioting transvestites at the Stonewall Inn in 1969. For a smart discussion of the value and vicissitudes of camp, see Daniel Harris, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture (New York: Hyperion, 1997), 8–39.

17. R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (1967), excerpted in The Sixties: The Art, Attitudes, Politics, and Media of Our Most Explosive Decade, ed. Gerald Howard (New York: Marlowe, 1995), 199.

18. David Ehrenstein, “King of Hearts,” available online at http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/956-king-of-hearts.

19. Sexton to Brother Dennis Farrell, 16 July 1962, in Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters, ed. Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 144

20. Sontag, Against Interpretation, 276.

21. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), vii. The chasm was often traversed, see Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, High and Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1991).

22. Liesl Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), esp. 5, 33–57.

23. Quoted in Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 550–51.

24. Quoted in Janet Malcolm, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 12.

25. Greenberg, “Surrealist Painting,” (1944) in The Collected Essays and Criticism: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 225. Of course, Greenberg was writing during World War II. At that historical moment perhaps the relevance of Dada should have been apparent.

26. Michael North, Novelty: A History of the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 10, 172ff.

27. Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870 to 1930 (New York: Scribner’s, 1931), 2. On the birth of the postmodern in the 1960s, see Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Unlimited: The Sixties and the Birth of the Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). Was the New Sensibility solely an American phenomenon? Certainly similar things were happening in Great Britain during the same time frame. See Richard Weight, Mod: A Very British Style (London: Bodley Head, 2013); Bernard Levin, Run It Down the Flagpole: Britain in the Sixties (New York: Atheneum, 1971); Francis Wheen, Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s; The Golden Age of Paranoia (New York: Public Affairs, 2009); Robert Hewison, Too Much: Art and Society in the Sixties, 1960–1975 (London: Methuen, 1986). In England, especially in the 1950s, issues were related to class. A further question: Was the New Sensibility articulated because of capitalist development? No doubt rising standards of living especially helped the development of a youth culture, in both nations. However, a reaction against aspects of the modernist ethic, creating a new style, with a specific subject matter, strikes me as more compelling as an explanation.

28. Irving Howe, “The Culture of Modernism,” in The Decline of the New (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), 3–33; Harry Levin, “What Was Modern?” (1960) in Refractions: Essays in Contemporary Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 271–95; Susan Stanford Friedman, “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 8, no. 3 (2001), 493–513; Suzi Gablik, Has Modernism Failed? (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1984); Peter Bürger, “The Decline of Modernism,” in The Decline of Modernism, trans. Nicholas Walker (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 33–44. The issue of modernism is connected with that of the rise of the avant-garde, yet another area of contention. Did the avant-garde die because it became commonplace, corrupted, or coopted? Helpful on this issue are Peter Bürger, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); John Weighton, The Concept of the Avant-Garde: Explorations in Modernism (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1973); Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), and the highly challenging Paul Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). Finally, for an excellent review of modernism(s), see Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008), 737–48. It deals with modernism as a transnational phenomenon and explores the circulation of its texts and the role of dissemination and mass media technologies.

29. Particularly valuable, in part for extending the notion of the 1960s back to the 1950s, is Robert Genter, Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), especially for his appreciation for modernism as a living entity and the difficulties of pinning it down. He covers quite a different group of figures than do I. Also invaluable are Stuart D. Hobbs, The End of the American Avant Garde (New York: New York University Press, 1997); W. T. Lhamon Jr., Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990); Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (New York: Twayne, 1998); and Fred Kaplan, 1959: The Year That Changed Everything (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2009). On the postmodern, see Huyssen, After the Great Divide; Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). Of late, some analysts have begun to look at postwar modernism as an international phenomenon, and for a nice attempt at defining a modernist sensibility see Richard Pells, Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies, and the Globalization of American Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), x. See also Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London: Verso, 2004); David Steigerwald, Culture’s Vanities: The Paradox of Cultural Diversity in a Globalized World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). For the quote on “Free-Style Classicism,” see Charles Jencks, Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), 7.

30. Antin quoted in Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970 (Chicago, 1989), xi. See also Antin, “Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry,” Boundary 2 (1972), 98–133; Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (1971; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 263.

31. Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 9.

32. Of course, some protested the value of the term and its definitions. Arthur O. Lovejoy famously counted thirteen different, contradictory meanings).

33. Daniel Wickberg, “What is the History of Sensibilities?: On Cultural Histories, Old and New,” American Historical Review 112 (June 2007): 663. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 46–50; Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 30–32; Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5.

34. Lionel Trilling, “Reality in America,” in The Liberal Imagination (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1953), 7.

35. Howard, “Introduction,” The Sixties, 16.

36. George Lipsitz, “Who’ll Stop the Rain?: Youth Culture, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Social Crises,” in The Sixties: From Memory to History, ed. David Farber (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 209; David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (New York: Hill & Wang, 1994), 52. In his discussion of the militarization of the United States, Michael S. Sherry notes examples of culture following that line but remarks that the “diversity” of culture made it unusual to march in lock-step with such a trend. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 158.

37. Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” in Against Interpretation (New York: Picador, 1990), 213, 224, 13–14.

38. The phrase comes from Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture (New York: Delacorte, 1968). William Faulkner recognized how the atomic bomb had altered the cultural field. In his Nobel Prize address of 1950, he stated: “There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problem of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing.” Quoted in Paul S. Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 251.

39. Norman Mailer, “The White Negro,” in Advertisements for Myself (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959), 339; Allen Ginsberg, Howl (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 4.

40. Kenneth Rexroth, “San Francisco Letter,” Evergreen Review 1, no. 2 (1957): 11.

41. John Cassidy, “Forces of Divergence: Is Surging Inequality Endemic to Capitalism?,” The New Yorker, 31 March 2014, 70.

42. Sontag quoted in Liam Kennedy, “Susan Sontag: The Intellectual and Cultural Criticism,” in American Cultural Critics, ed. David Murray (Exeter, UK: Exeter University Press, 1995), 80. Lhamon posits a connection between the employment of “a deliberatively speedy style” and “consumer economics” occurring in 1955. This is not unreasonable, but such close connections sometimes seem strained. Lhamon, Deliberate Speed, 7.

43. Fitzgerald quoted in Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), 4; Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). For the claim that “the only satisfactory semantic meaning of modernity lies in its association with capitalism,” see Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), 13.

44. Quoted in Morton Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, ed. B. H. Friedman (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000), 32.

45. Gunn quoted in George Melly, Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts (New York: Anchor, 1971), 41.

46. Tarantino quoted in Anthony Julius, Transgressions: The Offences of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 41.

47. Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular,’ ” in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 228. See also Denning, Age of Three Worlds, 98; Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (New York: Basic Books, 1974), esp. 75–93. For the view that high culture has been reduced to ruins, see James B. Twitchell, Carnival Culture: The Trashing of Taste in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 253–74.

48. Kael quoted in Craig Seligman, Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me (New York: Counterpoint, 2004), 56.

49. Sontag, “Thirty Years Later … ,” in Sontag, Against Interpretation, 307–12.

50. Karen Finley, “Politics,” in A Different Kind of Intimacy: The Collected Writings of Karen Finley (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2000), 99ff.; John Frohnmayer, Leaving Town Alive: Confessions of an Arts Warrior (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993).

51. Roxane Gay, “The Audacity of Voice,” Time, 6 October 2014, 50.

52. Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1996), 6.

53. Rauschenberg quoted in Barbara Rose, “Artful Dodger,” Artforum 36 (Summer 1998), 31.

54. As I scan the roster of figures discussed in this book, it is obvious that males predominate and that African American women are absent, as are Latina/o cultural creators. As noted earlier, there are a good number of homosexuals. And, for the same reason, quite a large number of Jews—hardly surprising, since in the 1950s and 1960s a Jewish cultural flowering was afoot in the United States. Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud in writing, along with Mark Rothko in painting, were dominant figures. But a slightly younger generation of Jewish artists—influenced perhaps more by assimilation than exile, more by potential atomic destruction than the Holocaust—came to the fore. They were both in and out of mainstream society, which gave them both the license and the imperative, perhaps, to push their art to extremes, to go too far. In contrast, for those individuals from communities still shackled by racial and economic injustice, the clarion call of excess was both more politically and artistically problematic.

55. Quoted in Damion Searls, “Book of Wander: W. G. Sebald’s Unsystematic Search,” Artforum 21 (April/May 2014), 42.

56. Thomas Buckley, “100 Fight Arrest of Lenny Bruce,” New York Times, 14 June 1964. Among those signing were Mailer, Vidal, Styron, and Baldwin. The support was widespread, however, with theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, critic Lionel Trilling, and poet Robert Lowell.

57. Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 51–88, and Dickstein, Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945–1970 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Daniel Bell, “The Sensibility of the Sixties,” in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 120–45; Irving Howe, “The New York Intellectuals,” in The Decline of the New (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), 260; Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America (San Francisco: Encounter, 2011), 81–100. For a positive view of the New Sensibility as a form of praxis, see Herbert Marcuse, “The New Sensibility,” in An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 23–48. For a witty attack on excess, viewed in terms of vulgarity, see Twitchell, Carnival Culture.

Prelude

1. Judith Malina, The Diaries of Judith Malina, 1947–1957 (New York: Grove, 1984), 201–3, 72. Unless otherwise noted, all Malina quotes are from this volume. A slightly different account of her embarrassment on the stage that evening is in Harold Norse, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel: A Fifty-Year Literary and Erotic Odyssey (New York: Thunder Mouth, 1989), 223–25. For a fine history of the group, see John Tytell, The Living Theatre: Art, Exile, and Outrage (New York: Grove, 1995). Helpful for their essential tenets and later work is Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre (1972, New York: Limelight, 1986); Aldo Rostagno, with Julian Beck and Judith Malina, We, the Living Theatre (New York: Ballantine, 1970). On Malina as a “taste bender,” see John Bernard Myers, Tracking the Marvelous: A Life in the New York Art World (New York: Random House, 1983), 24, 194.

2. Kenneth Rexroth, Beyond the Mountains (San Francisco: City Light, 1951), 31–33.

3. Judith Malina, “Excerpts from a Patient’s Journals” (ca. 1952), box 68, Living Theatre Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University.

4. Malina, Diaries, 178, 6.

5. Judith Malina, The Piscator Notebook (New York: Routledge, 2012), 5, 31, 17.

6. Malina, Diaries, 144.

7. Malina, Diaries, 170.

8. On the Malina/Beck relationship, see Tytell, Living Theatre, 92–99.

9. Malina, Diaries, 102.

10. Malina, Diaries, 150.

11. Malina, Diaries, 97–101.

12. Malina, “Excerpts from a Patient’s Journals,” 37.

13. Kenneth Silverman, Begin Again: Biography of John Cage (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 65.

14. Malina, Diaries, 189, 252.

15. Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), xii.

16. Malina, Diaries, 202.

17. Tytell, Living Theatre, 94–95; 98–104.

18. Tytell, Living Theatre, 225–42.

19. Malina, “MS. of Journal” (1952), box 7, Living Theatre Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, 594.

Chapter 1

1. John Gruen, The Party’s Over Now (Wainscott, NY: Pushcart, 1989), 158.

2. R. P., “Tudor Tries Hand at Experimenting,” New York Times, 2 January 1952, 20. A good analysis of Music of Changes is Grant Chu Covell, “1951 and Cage’s Music of Changes” La Folia: On Line Music Review, April 2006, http://www.lafolia.com/archive/covell/covell200604cage1951.html.

3. Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists (New York: Penguin, 2012). For an interpretation of 4’33” less inclined to emphasize Cage’s Buddhism and general philosophy, see Liz Kotz, Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2007), 13–26. For a delightful overview of Cage, and others connected with the New Sensibility (although the author does not use the term), see Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde (New York: Viking, 1965).

4. Quoted in Gruen, Party’s Over, 158.

5. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), 110. The layout of the sentence in the printed version is rather intricate.

6. Irving Sandler, in Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum, 1962–1974 (New York: Soho, 2000), 167.

7. Cage, Silence, 94.

8. Larson, Where the Heart Beats, 174–82.

9. Cage, Silence, 57–58. James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), is excellent on Cage’s process of composition and musical imperatives.

10. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, ed., The Boulez-Cage Correspondence, trans. Robert Samuels (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 106–7.

11. Virgil Thomson, An Autobiography (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966), 353.

12. Quoted in Richard Kostelanetz, John Cage (ex)plain(ed) (New York: Schirmer, 1996), 49, 74.

13. John Cage, in conversation with Daniel Charles, For the Birds (Boston: Marion Boyars, 1981), 57.

14. Quoted in David Revill, The Roaring Silence: John Cage: A Life (New York: Arcade, 1992), 110.

15. For some skepticism about the Cage and Schoenberg anecdote, see Brent Reidy, “Our Memory of What Happened Is Not What Happened: Cage, Metaphor, and Myth,” American Music 28 (Summer 2010): 211–27.

16. On some aspects of his life, especially his homosexual relationships in Los Angeles before marriage, see Jill Johnston, Jasper Johns: Privileged Information (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1996), 115–20.

17. Revill, Roaring Silence, 61–86.

18. Liesl Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2009).

19. “Music: Percussionist,” Time, 22 February, 1943, available online at http://content.www.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,774357,00.html.

20. “Percussion Concert: Band Bangs Things to Make Music,” Life, 15 March 1943, 46, 48.

21. R. P., “Prepared Pianos Give Odd Program,” New York Times, 11 December, 1946, 40.

22. “Sonata for Bolt and Screw,” Time, 24 January 1949, available online at http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/printout/0,8816,799692.00.html.

23. Cage to Boulez, in Nattiez, Boulez-Cage, 78.

24. Revill, Roaring, 162–63; Cage, Silence, 8. This story is central to the Cage mythos, but it is improbable that Cage heard either his nervous or circulatory systems.

25. Cage, Silence, 58, 59.

26. Morton Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, ed. B. H. Friedman (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000), 115.

27. Kenneth Silverman, Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 102–3. Harold Norse, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel (New York: William Morrow, 1989), 207–8.

28. Lionel Trilling, “Our Country and Our Culture,” Partisan Review 19, no. 3 (May-June, 1952): 319.

29. Stephen Spender, “The Modernist Movement Is Dead,” New York Times Book Review, 3 August 1952, 1, 16.

30. “All Eyes on Doris Day,” Colliers, 9 August 1952, 10–12.

31. On Kitt see “Midnight Purrs and Shouts,” Life, 4 August 1952, 48; on Hemingway, see Robert Gorham Davis, “Review of The Old Man and the Sea,” in New York Times Book Review, 7 September 1952, 1, 20. Harry Smith was in search of authenticity, turning to the past to find it. In 1952 his three-volume anthology of roots music was issued. He “was looking for exotic records … in relation to what was considered to be the world culture of high class music.” Harry Smith, quoted in Rani Singh, “Harry Smith, an Ethnographic Modernist in America,” in Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular, ed. Andrew Perchuk and Rani Singh (Los Angeles: Getty Institute, 2010), 30.

32. Calvin Tompkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time (New York: Penguin, 1980), 52–53.

33. For an evocative account of the music scene, see Christian Wolff, “Experimental Music around 1950 and Some Consequences and Causes (Social-Political and Music),” American Music 27 (Winter 2009): 424–40.

34. Gruen, Party’s Over, 175.

35. Revill, Roaring, 102–3; Feldman, Give My Regards, 97.

36. On the Artists’ Club and the excitement in New York City at this time, see Jed Perl, New Art City: Manhattan At Mid-Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005); Irving Sandler, A Sweeper-Up after Artists: A Memoir (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 26–42; William B. Scott and Peter M. Rutkoff, New York Modern: The Arts and the City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 310–19. Sandler does not recall Cage as a regular at either the Cedar Tavern or the Club, in contrast to Feldman. For an account more critical of the politics of the American avant-garde, see Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

37. Dan Wakefield, New York in the Fifties (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 19.

38. Material on this concert is drawn from Carolyn Brown, Chance and Circumstance (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 25–26; Gann, No Such Thing, 1–3, passim; Revill, Roaring, 165ff.; Nyman, Experimental Music, 3–30.

39. Revill, Roaring Silence, 165.

40. Gann, No Such Thing 14, 15, 20.

41. Jill Johnston, Marmalade Me (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998), 63.

42. Cage, Silence, 93.

43. Feldman, Give My Regards, 151.

44. Cage to Boulez, 22 May 1951, in Nattiez, Boulez-Cage, 96. Reading Artaud, he wrote, “gave me the idea for a theater without literature. Words and poetry may, of course, enter into it. But the rest, everything that is in general non-verbal, may enter into it as well.” A perfect vehicle, then, for Cage’s pluralist vision of art which was designed simply to have art “introduce us to life.” See Brown, Chance, 21; Cage, For the Birds, 52.

45. Material on Black Mountain and the piece is drawn from Martin Duberman, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 370–75; Revill, Roaring Silence, 161ff.; Silverman, Begin Again, 113–20; Brown, Chance, 6–21; Vincent Katz, ed., Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 133–39; Calvin Tompkins, Off the Wall, 66–75.

46. On Cage’s wide influence, see Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 28. For a piece highly critical of Cage’s work, see Richard Taruskin, “No Ear for Music: The Scary Purity of John Cage,” New Republic, 15 March 1993.

47. Richard Gilman, The Confusion of Realms (New York: Random House, 1969).

48. Caroline A. Jones, “John Cage and the Abstract Expressionist Ego,” Critical Inquiry 19 (Summer 1993): 628–65. See also Michael S. Sherry, Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 196–97. Of course, Cage’s outrageous excess in music might be seen as having affinities with a camp sensibility as outlined by Susan Sontag. See Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation, and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 275–92.

49. Quoted in Stuart D. Hobbs, The End of the American Avant Garde (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 59.

Chapter 2

1. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963; repr., New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 5.

2. Sam Hunter, Robert Rauschenberg: Works, Writings and Interviews (Barcelona: Edicions Poligrafa, 2006), 63; Walter Hopps, Early Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s (Houston: Houston Fine Art Press, 1991) 150–53; Carolyn Brown, Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 84–85.

3. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism: Affirmations and Refusals, 1950–1956, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 122. Greenberg was a formalist, seeing Jackson Pollock as leading the charge in painting. Rosenberg, in contrast, was more interested in the existential relationship between the artist and canvas.

4. Brown, Chance and Circumstance, 85.

5. Leo Steinberg, Encounters with Rauschenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 16–19.

6. Mary Lynn Kotz, Rauschenberg/Art and Life (1990, repr., New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004), 82; Brian O’Doherty, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth (New York: Random House, [1973]), 191; Barbara Rose, Rauschenberg: An Interview (New York: Vintage, 1987), 51; Irving Sandler, A Sweeper Up after Artists: A Memoir (London: Thames & Hudson, 203), 251; Andrew Forge, Rauschenberg, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1969), n.p.; Brendan W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 91; Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time (New York: Penguin, 1980), 96–97; “Robert Rauschenberg—Erased De Kooning,” YouTube, uploaded 15 May 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpCWh3IFtDQ.

7. Hopps, Early Rauschenberg, 161.

8. Rose, Interview, 51.

9. Steinberg, Encounters, 20–21.

10. “Robert Rauschenberg—Erased De Kooning,” YouTube.

11. Kotz, Rauschenberg, 89.

12. Joseph, Random Order, 89; Rosalind E. Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Part 1,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 8–199; Robert S. Mattison, Robert Rauschenberg: Breaking Boundaries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 56–57; Roni Feinstein, “Random Order: The First Fifteen Years of Robert Rauschenberg” (PhD diss., New York University, 1990), 85–139.

13. John Cage, “On Robert Rauschenberg,” in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), 98.

14. Feinstein, “Random Order,” 4–5.

15. Kotz, Rauschenberg, 76.

16. James Fitzsimmons, “Art,” Arts and Architecture 70 (October 1953): 34.

17. Hubert Crehan, “Raw Duck,” Art Digest 27 (September 1953): 25; in the same issue was a more favorable notice of the work, Dore Ashton, “Bob Rauschenberg,” 21, 21; Tomkins, Off the Wall, 85.

18. Sandler, Sweeper Up, 250.

19. Rauschenberg, “Interview with Richard Kostelanetz,” (1968) in Hunter, Rauschenberg, 134.

20. Hunter, Rauschenberg, 55.

21. Cage, “On Robert Rauschenberg,” 102; Tomkins, Off the Wall, 71.

22. Cage, “On Robert Rauschenberg,” 107.

23. Forge, Rauschenberg, n.p.; Joseph, Random Order, 57.

24. Joseph, Random Order, 67–68.

25. On Duchamp see Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), and Jerrold Seigel, The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp: Desire, Liberation, and the Self in Modern Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Carlos Basualdo and Erica F. Battle, eds., Dancing around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg, and Duchamp (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), deals fully with the presence of Duchamp and his influence on Cage, Cunningham, Johns, and Rauschenberg.

26. Basualdo and Battle, Dancing around the Bride, 310.

27. O’Doherty, American Masters, 201; Rose, Interview, 56.

28. Joseph, Random Order, 89; Feinstein, “Random Order,” 116. The Duchamp piece was Object with Hidden Notes (1916).

29. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), 3–11.

30. Kotz, Rauschenberg, 89; Rauschenberg, “Statement,” in Sixteen Americans, ed. Dorothy Miller (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 58.

31. Cage, “On Robert Rauschenberg,” 99.

32. Hopps, Early Rauschenberg, 162.

33. Joseph, Random Order, 60.

34. Hopps, Early Rauschenberg, 114–15.

35. Feinstein, “Random Order,” 105.

36. Brown, Chance and Circumstance, 35; Kotz, Rauschenberg, 76; Joseph, Random Order, 81–82. According to Feinstein, “Random Order,” Rauschenberg’s intent “was to provoke the spectator to see” (104, 105).

37. Helen Molesworth, “Before Bed,” October 63 (Winter 1993): 71–72. In contrast, see Jonathan Katz, “ ‘Committing the Perfect Crime’: Sexuality, Assemblage, and the Postmodern Turn in American Art,” Art Journal 67, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 38–53. See also Marjorie Perloff, “Watchman, Spy and Dead Man: Jasper Johns, Frank O’Hara, John Cage and the ‘Aesthetic of Indifference,” Modernism/Modernity 8, no. 2 (2001): 197–223.

38. Mattison, Robert Rauschenberg, 32.

39. Robert Rauschenberg, “Interview with Kostelanetz,” in Hunter, Rauschenberg, 144.

40. Basualdo and Battle, Dancing around the Bride, 215; Cage quoted in Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art, 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 112.

41. Roth, “Aesthetic of Indifference,” in Dancing Around, 209–13. She does view Johns’s flag paintings from 1954 as more engaged with the patriotism of the historical moment. Joseph argues that Cage, from his earliest days, had a “recognition of the capitalist totalization of the globe.” Joseph, Random Order, 19. On how a Kierkegaardian “No” applied to artists, see Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” in The Tradition of the New, 32.

42. Jonathan Katz, “ ‘Committing the Perfect Crime’: Sexuality, Assemblage, and the Postmodern Turn in American Art,” Art Journal 67, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 45, 51.

43. Exemplary of this thesis are: Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), and Eve Cockcroft, “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War,” Artforum 12 (June 1974): 39–41.

44. Hunter, Rauschenberg, 46.

45. William Seitz, The Art of Assemblage (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 116.

46. Joseph, Random Order, 17.

47. Rose, Interview, 72.

48. Michael Sherry, Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 101.

49. Kotz, Rauschenberg, 71; Cage, “On Robert Rauschenberg,” 101.

Chapter 3

1. The significance of a jacket in On the Waterfront is also apparent. For an analysis of it, and of the film in general, see Leo Braudy, On the Waterfront (London: BFI, 2005), 38ff.

2. J. Hoberman, An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War (New York: New Press, 2011), 253–54.

3. The origins of this line lie in a conversation between director Stanley Kramer and a biker. Peter Manso, Brando: The Biography (New York: Hyperion, 1994), 339.

4. Susan L. Mizruchi is especially good on Brando as a minimalist actor, influenced by reading and his passion for modern jazz. Mizruchi, Brando’s Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), xxii, xxxvii.

5. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 3–14. On the centrality of spontaneity in this period, although it omits Brando, see Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

6. Angela Carter, Notes for a Theory of Sixties Style (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), 105. And teens consumed leather jackets as visible signs of rebellion, albeit coopted ones. Grace Palladino, Teenagers: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 96ff.

7. Elia Kazan, A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 525; David Downing, Marlon Brando (New York: Stein & Day, 1984), 46, 53. See also the essays on the film in Joanna E. Rapf, ed., On the Waterfront (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

8. A. W., “Astor Offers ‘On the Waterfront,’ ” New York Times, 29 July 1954, 18.

9. The Wild Ones was actually first released on 30 December 30 1953. “Cinema: A Tiger in the Reeds,” Time, 11 October 1954.

10. Louis Berg, “Streetcar to Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, 16 July 1950, 116.

11. Marlon Brando, Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me (New York: Random House, 1994), 121.

12. Manso, Brando, 257.

13. Brando, Songs, 223.

14. Hedda Hopper, “Actor Defies Usual Movie Customs: Hollywood Shaken by Nonconformity of Marlon Brando,” Los Angeles Times, 7 May 1950.

15. Stefan Kanter, Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 94; Darwin Porter, Brando Unzipped (New York: Blood Moon, 2005), 295.

16. Manso, Brando, 286–87; Carlo Fiore, Bud: The Brando I Knew (New York: Delacorte, 1974), 106–7; Ty Burr, Gods Like Us: On Movie Stardom and Modern Fame (New York: Pantheon, 2012); Berg, “Streetcar to Hollywood,”116.

17. Manso, Brando, 430.

18. Truman Capote, “Profiles: The Duke in His Domain,” New Yorker, 19 November 1957, 56.

19. Rita Moreno, Rita Moreno: A Memoir (New York: Celebra, 2013), 155, 160; Manso, Brando, 284–85.

20. Graham McCann, Rebel Males: Clift, Brando and Dean (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991); David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Robert J. Corber, In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); David Savran, Taking it Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). On Brando’s bisexuality see Manso, Brando, 89–91, 161–65. See also the rather sensationalistic Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince, Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote and Famous Members of Their Entourage ([New York]: Blood Moon, 2014), 32, passim.

21. Trilling, “The Kinsey Report,” in The Liberal Imagination (New York: Viking, 1950), 216–35; Bart Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture (Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 2005). On the report and American society, see Miriam G. Reumann, American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

22. Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 51–97. See also Elizabeth Fraterrigo, Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), esp. 48–79.

23. James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 314; on the rise of television, see Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), 338–67.

24. On the centrality of this metaphor for the period, see W. T. Lhamon Jr., Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1990).

25. Patterson, Grand Expectations, 348–69, 269–94.

26. Jeff Young, ed., Kazan: The Master Director Discusses His Films (New York: Newmarket, 1990), 150.

27. On Brando and his makeup practices, see Mizruchi, Brando Smiles, 54–56.

28. John Bak, “ ‘sneakin’ and spyin’ ’’ from Broadway to the Beltway: Cold War Masculinity, Brick, and Homosexual Existentialism,” Theatre Journal 56 (May 2004): 225–49.

29. McCann, Rebel Males, 2.

30. Michael T. Schuyler, “He ‘coulda been a contender’ for Miss America: Feminizing Brando in On the Waterfront,” Canadian Review of American Studies 41, no. 1 (2011): 100–103.

31. Richard Schickel, Brando (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1991), 90. On the politics of the film, see Braudy, On the Waterfront, and Peter Biskind, “The Politics of Power in ‘On the Waterfront,’ ” Film Quarterly 29 (Autumn 1975): 25–38.

32. Leo Braudy, “ ‘No Body’s Perfect’: Method Acting and 50s Culture,” Michigan Quarterly Review 35 (Winter 1996): 194–98; James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 200–202.

33. Whereas Stanislavski also preached the value of improvisation. See Naremore, Acting, 201.

34. Kanfer, Somebody, 37; McCann, Rebel, 84–85.

35. Stella Adler, The Art of Acting, comp. and ed. Howard Kissel (New York: Applause, 2000), 22, 165; Eduard J. Erslovas, “On the Waterfront and the Method” (MA thesis, California State University, Long Beach, 1993), 26–42.

36. Brando, Songs, 80–81.

37. McCann, Rebel, 89.

38. Foster Hirsch, A Method to Their Madness: The History of the Actor’s Studio (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), sees Brando as beholden to Strasberg, a reading that Brando would reject. Brando, Songs, 122.

39. Brando, Songs, 175ff.; Manso, Brando, 339–42.

40. Stanley Kramer, A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: A Life in Hollywood (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997), 55–57.

41. Kanfer, Somebody, 116; Martin Rubin, “ ‘Make Love Make War’: Cultural Confusion and the Biker Film Cycle,” Film History 6 (Autumn 1994): 360ff.; Jerold Simmons, “Violent Youth: The Censoring and Public Reception of the Wild One and the Blackboard Jungle,” Film History 20, no. 3 (2008): 381–83.

42. Brando, Songs, 202.

43. Brando, Songs, 64, 71.

44. Kazan, A Life, 255.

45. Brando, Songs, 178–79.

46. Kanfer, Somebody, 130; Brando, Songs, 198.

47. Budd Schulberg, On the Waterfront: A Screenplay (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 104. The dialogue quoted in the text is as it appears in the script.

48. Brando, Songs, 199.

49. Brando, Songs, 418.

50. Brando, Songs, 126.

51. “A Tiger in the Reeds,” Time, 11 October 1954.

52. Brando, Songs, 5–7. On his problematic childhood see Kanfer, Somebody, 4–8.

53. Brando, Songs, 125; Joe Morello and Edward Z. Epstein, Brando: An Unauthorized Biography (New York: Crown, 1973), 45. For more on these psychological stresses, see Manso, Brando, 244–46.

54. Harold Clurman, All People Are Famous (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1974), 260.

55. Robert Brustein, “The New Hollywood: Myth and Anti-Myth,” Film Quarterly 12 (Spring 1959): 23–26.

56. Pauline Kael, “The Glamour of Delinquency,” in I Lost it at the Movies: The Essential Kael Collection, ’54 to ’65 (New York: Marion Boyars, 2002), 51.

57. Brando, Songs, 176.

58. Robert Tanitch, Brando (London: Studio Vista, 1994), 54.

Chapter 4

1. On this connection see Michael Trask, “Patricia Highsmith’s Method,” American Literary History 22, no. 3 (2010): 584–614. David Riesman, in collaboration with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950), 9, 20–3. On the shift in identity and character more generally, see Wilfred M. McClay, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), esp. 226–68.

2. See Patricia Highsmith, afterword to The Price of Salt, in Selected Novels and Short Stories, ed. Joan Schenkar (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 577–80.

3. Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (New York: St. Martin’s, 2009), 269.

4. Andrew Wilson, Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), 152.

5. Schenkar, Talented, 282. Highsmith recorded this observation on July 1, 1950, a day after she had stalked Senn’s home in New Jersey.

6. On Kathleen Senn see Schenkar, Talented, 50–51, 267–68, 270–73.

7. Schenkar, Talented, xviii.

8. Wilson, Beautiful Shadow, 167; Schenkar, Talented, 273.

9. Schenkar, Talented, xviii.

10. Wilson, Beautiful Shadow, 21.

11. Schenkar, Talented, 87.

12. Schenkar, Talented, 27, 157–70.

13. Schenkar, Talented, 130–37.

14. Schenkar, Talented, 293. On Koestler and his relations for women, see Noel Malcolm, review of Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual, by Michael Scammell, Telegraph, 14 February 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/7205860/Koestler-The-Indispensable-Intellectual-by-Michael-Scammell-review.html.

15. James Sallis, review of The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith, Boston Review, 1 October 2001, http://bostonreview.net/fiction-books-ideas/james-sallis-review-selected-stories-patricia-highsmith.

16. Hillis Millis, “Bruno Takes Over,” New York Times Book Review, 21 May 1950, 15.

17. Schenkar, Talented, 282.

18. Highsmith, Selected Novels, 25. The themes of murdered wives, confused identities, and guilt also figure in Highsmith’s next novel, The Blunderer, published in 1954.

19. Wilson, Beautiful Shadow, 123.

20. Highsmith, Selected Novels, 66.

21. Highsmith, Selected Novels, 173. On Guy and Bruno’s merging identities see Noel Mawer, A Critical Study of the Fiction of Patricia Highsmith: From the Psychological to the Political (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2004), 64–100.

22. Odette L’Henry Evans, “A Feminist Approach to Patricia Highsmith’s Fiction,” in American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King, ed. Brian Doherty (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990), 107.

23. Highsmith, Selected Novels, 232, 235.

24. Highsmith, Selected Novels, 239.

25. Wilson, Beautiful Shadow, 153; Schenkar, Talented, 263–65.

26. Schenkar, Talented, 287–88.

27. Schenkar, Talented, 287–89; Wilson, Beautiful Shadow, 156–60.

28. Wilson, Beautiful Shadow, 168.

29. Jaye Zimet, Strange Sisters: The Art of Lesbian Pulp Fiction, 1949–1969 (New York: Viking Studio, 1999), 27; Schenkar, Talented, 279.

30. David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Joanne Meyerowitz, “Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass Culture, 1946–1956,” Journal of American History 79 (March 1993): 1455–82.

31. Miriam G. Reumann, American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

32. Russell Harrison, Patricia Highsmith (New York: Twayne, 1997), 101; Highsmith, Selected Novels, 579. Especially insightful, and entertaining, on the novel is Terry Castle, “Pulp Valentine: Patricia Highsmith’s Erotic Lesbian Thriller,” Slate, 23 May 2006, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/pulp_fiction/2006/05/pulp_valentine_4.html.

33. Highsmith, The Price of Salt, 341, 375.

34. Highsmith, Selected Novels, 393.

35. This anticipates the famous road trip undertaken by Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita.

36. Highsmith, Selected Novels, 522, 536.

37. Highsmith, Selected Novels, 546.

38. Highsmith, Selected Novels, 567–68.

39. Highsmith, Selected Novels, 575.

40. Wilson, Beautiful Shadow, 187.

41. George Cotkin, Existential America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

42. Fiona Peters, Anxiety and Evil in the Writings of Patricia Highsmith (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 171.

43. Schenkar, Talented, 117.

44. On Chambers see the excellent biography by Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers (New York: Random House, 1997).

45. Schenkar, Talented, 29.

46. Schenkar, Talented, 430–32.

47. Schenkar, Talented, 89, 323–25.

48. Wilson, Beautiful Shadow, 179.

49. Wilson, Beautiful Shadow, 187.

50. Peters, Anxiety, 30.

51. Anthony Channell Hilfer, “ ‘Not Really Such a Monster’: Highsmith’s Ripley as Thriller Protagonist and Protean Man,” Midwest Quarterly 25 (Summer 1984): 361–74; Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley, in Highsmith, Selected Novels, 34, 38.

52. Highsmith, Talented, 53. On Ripley as a perversion of the Horatio Alger success-story ideal, see Alex Tuss, “Masculine Identity and Success: A Critical Analysis of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club,” Journal of Men’s Studies 12 (Winter 2004): 97; Highsmith, Talented, 53.

53. Highsmith, Talented, 100. On Ripley’s gestures see Erlene Hubly, “A Portrait of the Artist: The Novels of Patricia Highsmith,” Clues 5, no. 1 (1984): 128.

54. Highsmith, Talented, 104. For an intriguing take on Ripley as a “male lesbian,” see Slavoj Žižek, “Not a Desire to Have Him, But to Be Like Him,” London Review of Books, 21 August 2003, 13–14.

55. Highsmith, Talented, 192. For a reading of the murder as mimicking Christ’s crucifixion, see Leonard Cassuto, Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 142.

56. Highsmith, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (Boston: The Writer, 1966), 51; Highsmith, Talented, 289.

Chapter 5

1. Ginsberg to Robert LaVigne, 3 August 1956 and Rebecca Ginsberg, 11 August 1956, in The Letters of Allen Ginsberg, ed. Bill Morgan (New York: Da Capo, 2008), 139–41; Bill Morgan, I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg (New York: Penguin, 2006), 220–22.

2. Barry Miles, Ginsberg: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 188–220.

3. Quoted in Jane Kramer, Allen Ginsberg in America (New York: Random House, 1969), 48.

4. Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (New York: Viking, 1958), quoted in Allen Ginsberg, Howl: 50th Anniversary Edition (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), appendix 2, 166. The best account of the Six reading, and of Howl, is Jonah Raskin, American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 13–19. See also Steven Watson, The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944–60 (New York: Pantheon, 1995), 180–87; and Miles, Ginsberg, 188–213. On Ginsberg’s poem within the context of the San Francisco poetry renaissance, see Michael Davidson, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 76–85.

5. Quoted in Ginsberg, Howl, appendix 2, 167.

6. Quoted in Ginsberg, Howl, 168.

7. Ann Charters, Beat Down to Your Soul, (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 375; Gregory Corso, with Allen Ginsberg, “Literary Technique and the Beat Generation,” in Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952–95, ed. Bill Morgan (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 241.

8. Corso, “Literary Technique,” 241; Charters, Beat Down to Your Soul, 518.

9. Ginsberg, Howl, 3–6.

10. Jack Goodman, quoted in Rebecca Solnit, Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War (San Francisco: City Lights, 1990), 48.

11. Michael McClure, Scratching the Beat Surface (San Francisco: North Point, 1982), 15.

12. Ginsberg, Howl, 6.

13. Snyder, “Notes on the Beat Generation,” in Charters, Beat Down to Your Soul, 518.

14. McClure, Scratching, 13.

15. Bill Morgan, I Celebrate Myself, 209.

16. Allen Ginsberg, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems, 1937–1952, ed. Juanita Liebermann-Plimpton and Bill Morgan (New York: DaCapo Press, 2006), 169.

17. Ginsberg to Kerouac, 5 June 1955, in Bill Morgan and David Stanford, eds., Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 298; Kramer, Allen Ginsberg in America, 42.

18. Michael Schumacher, Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), 192.

19. Allen Ginsberg, Journals: Mid-Fifties, 1954–1958, ed. Gordon Ball (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 139–40.

20. Ginsberg to Kerouac, 25 August 1955, in Morgan and Stanford, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, 319.

21. Schumacher, Dharma Lion, 200.

22. Quoted in Schumacher, Dharma Lion, 197.

23. Quoted in Miles, Ginsberg, 187.

24. Allen Ginsberg, “First Thought, Best Thought,” in Ginsberg, Composed on the Tongue, ed. Donald Allen (Bolinas, CA: Grey Fox, 1976), 106.

25. On the confessional aspects of the poem, especially in relation to other confessional poets of the period, see Anne Hartman, “Confessional Counterpublics in Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg,” Journal of Modern Literature 28, no. 4 (Summer 2005): 50–53.

26. Ginsberg, Journals, 115.

27. Raskin, American Scream, 81; Schumacher, Dharma Lion, 196.

28. Ginsberg, Howl, 7.

29. Allen Ginsberg, “Interview with Tom Clark” (1965) and “Interview with Barry Farrell” (1966), both in Ginsberg, Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958–1996, ed. David Carter (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 24, 55.

30. Allen Ginsberg, “Kaddish,” in Collected Poems, 1947–1997 (New York: HarperPerennial, 2006), 230.

31. James Breslin, “Allen Ginsberg: The Origins of ‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish’ ” Iowa Review 8 no. 2 (Spring 1977): 94.

32. Ginsberg to Kerouac, ca. 16 December 1948, in Morgan and Stanford, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, 53.

33. Ginsberg, Letters of Allen Ginsberg, 33.

34. Watson, Birth of the Beat Generation, 110–12.

35. Ginsberg, Howl, 7.

36. On his hospitalization see the revisionist piece by Janet Hadda, “Ginsberg in Hospital,” American Imago 65 no. 2 (Summer 2008): 229–59. Although Ginsberg dedicated Howl to Solomon, he actually later claimed to have had his mother in mind. See Schumacher, Dharma Lion, 208. Ginsberg was not confined to Rockland; he was at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Raskin, American Scream, 90.

37. Ginsberg, Howl, 5.

38. Graham Caveney, Screaming with Joy: The Life of Allen Ginsberg (New York: Broadway, 1999), 33–37.

39. Ginsberg, Book of Martyrdom, 503, 123; Ginsberg to Helen Parker, 12 October 1950, in Ginsberg, Letters of Allen Ginsberg, 62.

40. Ginsberg to Neal Cassady, 7 September 1951, in Ginsberg, Letters of Allen Ginsberg, 74–75.

41. John Clellon Holmes, “The Philosophy of the Beat Generation” in Charters, Beat Down to Your Soul, 231.

42. Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 118.

43. Ginsberg, Howl, 3, 6, 7. After the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Ginsberg became fixated on nuclear apocalypse.

44. I thank my editor, Brendan O’Neill, for this suggestion.

45. Ginsberg to Kerouac, 25 August 1955, in Morgan and Stanford, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, 319.

46. Allen Ginsberg, “Literary Technique and the Beat Generation,” in Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 230.

47. On Moloch as capturing some of Ginsberg’s feelings toward his father, see Breslin, “Origins of ‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish,’ ” 92–93.

48. Howe, “This Age of Conformity,” Partisan Review 21 (January–February, 1954): 7–33.

49. Alan Valentine, The Age of Conformity (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1954).

50. Ginsberg, Howl, 4, 8.

51. Ginsberg, Howl, 4.

52. Quoted in Ronald Sukenick, Down and In: Life in the Underground (New York: Beech Tree, 1987), 95, 116. See also Diane di Prima, Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years (New York: Viking, 2001), 163.

53. All of these quotes are in Ginsberg, Howl, 156, 161. One of Trilling’s most engaging fictional pieces, “Of This Time, of That Place” deals with a mentally unhinged but immensely talented and rebellious student. Some have speculated that it was based on Ginsberg, but Trilling stated in a letter that Ginsberg was not the model but that Ginsberg identified with the main character. Moreover, Trilling stated that he never doubted Ginsberg’s rationality. Trilling to Leslie Fiedler, 17 May 1964, box 1, Lionel Trilling Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

54. Quoted in Ginsberg, Howl: 50th Anniversary Edition, 162–64.

55. Court transcripts, letters, newspaper clippings, and almost all information regarding the case against Howl can be found in Bill Morgan and Nancy J. Peters, eds., Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression, (San Francisco: City Lights, 2006), 2–3. J. W. Ehrlich, ed., Howl of the Censor: The Four Letter Word on Trial (San Carlos, CA: Nourse, 1956), has a fuller copy of the transcript.

56. Ginsberg to Robert Creeley, 11 December 1956, in Ginsberg, Letters of Allen Ginsberg, 147.

57. Ginsberg to Ferlinghetti, 10 June 1957 in Ginsberg, Letters of Allen Ginsberg, 155.

58. See the discussion of Roth in Edward De Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius (New York: Random House, 1992), 273–326.

59. Morgan and Peters, Howl on Trial, 130. See also De Grazia, Girls, 327–42.

60. Morgan and Peters, Howl on Trial, 136.

61. Morgan and Peters, Howl on Trial, 131.

62. Morgan and Peters, Howl on Trial, 181.

63. Morgan and Peters, Howl on Trial, 198.

Chapter 6

1. The lyrics for the song had been revised somewhat. Gone was: “You wear them dresses, the sun comes shining through / I can’t believe all that mess belongs to you.” Colin Escott, Good Rockin’ Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll, with Martin Hawkins (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 195. On the history of the song, first recorded in 1955 by Big Maybelle and produced by Quincy Jones for OKeh records label, see Nick Tosches, Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock ’n’ Roll (New York: Da Capo, 1996), 70. On Lewis, see the first-rate biography by Rick Bragg, Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story (New York: HarperCollins, 2014).

2. Robert Palmer, Jerry Lee Lewis Rocks! (New York: Delilah, 1981), 7.

3. Quoted in Paul Friedlander, Rock and Roll: A Social History (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996), 49.

4. Palmer, Lewis Rocks!, 22.

5. Linda Martin and Kerry Segrave, Anti-Rock: The Opposition to Rock ’n’ Roll (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1988), 75.

6. Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music, 5th ed. (New York: Plume, 2008), 169; Escott, Good Rockin’, 189.

7. Stephen J. Whitfield, A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (New York: Free Press, 1988), places the murder within the context of southern lynchings.

8. Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 193.

9. John A. Jackson, American Bandstand: Dick Clark and the Making of a Rock ’n’ Roll Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 55–58.

10. Horace Newcomb, “The Opening of America: Meaningful Difference in 1950s Television,” in The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons, ed. Joel Foreman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 104. Newcomb also discusses how the television show Have Gun, Will Travel, about Paladin, a sophisticated gunman, challenged traditional sensibilities for the Western genre, 119.

11. David R. Shumway, “Watching Elvis: The Male Rock Star as Object of the Gaze,” in Foreman, The Other Fifties, 125–27.

12. Glenn C. Altschuler, All Shook Up: How Rock ’n’ Roll Changed America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 162–63.

13. Bruce Pegg, Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry (New York: Routledge, 2002), 67–68; Howard A. DeWitt, Chuck Berry: Rock ’n’ Roll Music (Fremont, CA: Horizon, 1981), 77–82. On Berry’s ability to code protest, see George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 115.

14. Chuck Berry, The Autobiography (New York: Harmony, 1987), 202–3.

15. Berry, Autobiography, 116–17.

16. Carl Belz, The Story of Rock (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 61–62.

17. Imagine because the distance between listening to music and being liberated was often immense. See, Martha Bayles, Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 108. On Berry’s brilliance, see Robert Christgau, Any Old Way You Choose It: Rock and Other Pop Music, 1967–1973 (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), 140–8.

18. Richard Aquila, That Old Time Rock & Roll: A Chronicle of an Era, 1954–1963 (New York: Schirmer, 1989), 27ff.

19. Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 50; Altschuler, All Shook Up, 78–80.

20. Quoted in Grace Palladino, Teenagers: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 129.

21. Robert J. Cain, Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On: Jerry Lee Lewis (New York: Dial, 1981), 42. On Phillips and race see Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994), 96, 134–35.

22. Reebee Garofalo, Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the USA (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1997), 139; Cain, Whole Lotta Shakin’, 18.

23. Although he sometimes gets carried away with his prose and his claims, Nick Tosches captures Jerry Lee Lewis in brilliant fashion in Hellfire (New York: Grove, 1982). On Lewis’s youth see the book by his sister, Linda Gail Lewis, The Devil, Me, and Jerry Lee, with Les Pendleton (Atlanta: Longstreet, 1998), 13–22.

24. Bragg, His Own Story, 65–66. L. G. Lewis, The Devil, 14.

25. Garofalo, Rockin’ Out, 134; Palmer, Lewis Rocks!, 29.

26. Palmer, Lewis Rocks!, 26; L. G. Lewis, The Devil, 23.

27. Craig Morrison, Go Cat Go!: Rockabilly Music and Its Makers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 31ff.

28. For the “authenticity” of black rhythm and blues tradition, see Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm & Blues (New York: Pantheon, 1988); for sophisticated ripostes to this notion, see Ward, Just My Soul, and George Lipsitz, “ ‘Ain’t Nobody Here but Us Chickens’: The Class Origins of Rock and Roll,” in Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 303–34, and Steve Perry, “ ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’: The Politics of Crossover,” in Facing the Music, ed. Simon Frith (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 51–87.

29. George, Death, 62–65.

30. And white gospel music as well. See Jim Curtis, Rock Eras: Interpretations of Music and Society, 1954–1984 (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1987), 29–32.

31. Tosches, Hellfire, 72–74.

32. Bragg, His Own Story, 171.

33. Joe Bonomo, Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found (New York: Continuum, 2009), 20.

34. “Round the World in 96 Minutes,” New York Times, 6 October 1957, 193.

35. Myra Lewis, Great Balls of Fire: The Uncensored Story of Jerry Lee Lewis, with Murray Silver (New York: William Morrow, 1982), 111–12.

36. Kevin Crouch and Tanja Crouch, Sun King: The Life and Times of Sam Phillips, the Man Behind Sun Records (London: Piatkus, 2008), 153.

37. The conversation was recorded. See Tosches, Hellfire, 129–33.

38. Quoted in Tosches, Hellfire, 145–46.

39. Bragg, His Own Story, 189, 254.

40. Martin and Segrave, Anti-Rock, 13, 27.

41. Ward, Just My Soul, 95.

42. Altschuler, All Shook Up, 74; Ward, Just My Soul, 107, 91.

43. Quoted in Cain, Whole Lotta Shakin’, 12, 18.

44. Jimmy Gutterman, Rockin’ My Life Away: Listening to Jerry Lee Lewis (Nashville: Rutledge Hill, 1991, 71.

45. Tosches, Country, 73.

46. Lewis, Great Balls, 118–22.

47. Palmer, Lewis Rocks!, 62.

48. Tosches, Hellfire, 166.

49. Bonomo, Jerry Lee Lewis, 18.

50. Cain, Whole Lotta Shakin’, 25–31. Nabokov’s novel Lolita, with its story of a pedophiliac, was issued in the United States in August 1958 to great acclaim and shock. On the book, and its reception, see Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 356–83. On the connection between Lolita and Norman Mailer’s An American Dream (chapter 9), see John Whalen-Bridge, “Murderous Desire in Lolita (with Related Thoughts on Mailer’s An American Dream),” Nabokov Studies 7 (2002–3), 75–88.

51. Cain, Whole Lotta Shakin’, 32.

Chapter 7

1. The reviews are collected in Anne Wilkes Tucker, ed., Robert Frank: New York to Nova Scotia (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1986), 36–37. Parts of this chapter originally appeared in my article “The Photographer in the Beat-Hipster Idiom: Robert Frank’s The Americans,” American Studies 26 (Spring 1985): 19–33.

2. Gilbert Millstein, “In Each a Portrait,” New York Times, 17 January 1960, 7; William Hogan, “Photo Coverage of the Ugly American,” San Francisco Chronicle, 27 January 1960, 25.

3. “Review,” New Yorker, 14 May 1960, 203–4.

4. William S. Johnson, ed., The Pictures Are a Necessity: Robert Frank in Rochester, NY, November 1988, (Rochester, NY: International Museum of Photography George Eastman House, 1989), 116.

5. Quotes in Tom Maloney, ed., U.S. Camera 1958 (New York: U.S. Camera, 1957), 90, 115. The Americans was first published in a French edition in 1958, with an American edition appearing in 1959.

6. The article, “On the Road to Florida,” only appeared in print in the Evergreen Review in 1970. Reprinted in Tucker, New York to Nova Scotia, 38–41. I have been unable to find an explanation for the rejection. Kerouac did write that Frank blamed Kerouac’s text for its being turned down. Kerouac to Joyce Glassman, 4 June 1958, in Jack Kerouac and Joyce Johnson, Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957–1958 (New York: Viking, 2000), 148.

7. W. T. Lhamon Jr., Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), 125–35; Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 196–221.

8. Robert Frank, Moving Out, ed. Sarah Greenough and Philip Brookman (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1994), 98.

9. Robert Frank, The Lines of My Hand (New York: Pantheon, 1989), n.p. Frank did, however, like words on signs to appear in his images. The French edition of The Americans, to his chagrin, was accompanied by words: those of writers offering observations about the United States.

10. Jack Kerouac, “Introduction,” in Robert Frank, The Americans: Photographs (New York: Aperture, 1959), i–vi.

11. Robert Frank, “Statement,” in Robert Frank and Francois-Marie Banier, eds., Henry Frank: Father, Photographer, 1890–1976 (Göttingen, Germany: Steidel, 2009), n.p.

12. Johnson, Pictures Are a Necessity, 26–27. See also Dennis Wheeler, “Robert Frank Interviewed,” Criteria 3 (June 1977): 4–7.

13. Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters (New York: Washington Square, 1984), 254.

14. Quoted in Martin Gasser, “Zurich to New York: ‘Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice … ,’ ” in Frank, Moving Out, 47.

15. Quoted in Gasser, “Zurich to New York,” 100.

16. Quoted in Gasser, “Zurich to New York,” 104.

17. Quoted in Gasser, “Zurich to New York,” 106–8.

18. Tucker, New York to Nova Scotia, 20–21.

19. On Evans’s method, see Belinda Rathbone, Walker Evans: A Biography (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 123–24; for the “politics of the vernacular,” see James R. Mellow, Walker Evans (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 213ff. For the view that Frank lacked Evans’s humanity, see William Stott, “Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and the Landscape of Dissociation,” Artscanada 31 (December 1974): 83–89.

20. Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 77–79.

21. Eric J. Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 155–80; Edward Steichen, comp., The Family of Man: The Greatest Photographic Exhibition of All Time (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955), 91.

22. Tod Papageorge, Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 1981), 3–4.

23. Quoted in Johnson, Pictures Are a Necessity, 36.

24. Tucker, New York to Nova Scotia, 10.

25. Maloney, U.S. Camera 1958, 115.

26. Frank quoted in Johnson, Pictures Are a Necessity, 37; Allen Ginsberg, “Robert Frank to 1985—A Man,” in Tucker, New York to Nova Scotia, 74.

27. All quotes from Tucker, New York to Nova Scotia, 22, 24–26.

28. Frank, Lines of My Hand, n.p.

29. Johnson, Pictures Are a Necessity, 41.

30. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978), 61.

31. Such was also the case in the image “Political Rally—Chicago,” where a tuba can be imagined making music. On this photograph see Gene Markowski, The Art of Photography: Image and Illusion (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1984), 38–39.

32. Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Signet, n.d.), 148.

33. Johnson, Pictures Are a Necessity, 173.

34. Tucker, New York to Nova Scotia, 28.

35. Frank, Moving Out, 204.

36. Frank was hardly alone among adherents of the New Sensibility in turning to film in some manner—consider Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Bob Dylan, and Gore Vidal.

37. Frank, Moving Out, 220.

38. Quoted in Calvin Tomkins, The Scene: Reports on Post-Modern Art (New York: Viking, 1976), 173.

39. Amy Taubin, “Circling: Beginnings, Congratulations, Renewals: Robert Frank’s Personal New American Cinema,” in Frank Films: The Film and Video Work of Robert Frank, ed. Brigitta Burger-Utzer and Stefan Grissemann (Zurich: Scalo, 2003), 90.

40. Quoted in Eugenia Parry Janis and Wendy MacNeil, eds., Photography within the Humanities (Danbury, NH.: Addison House, 1977), 53.

Chapter 8

1. Malina Journal, Violet Copy, 3 June 1959, Living Theatre Records, Beinecke Library, Yale University (hereafter Living Theatre Records). Excellent on many areas of their life and work is John Tytell, The Living Theatre: Art, Exile, and Outrage (New York: Grove, 1995). See also Charles L. Mee Jr., “The Beck’s Living Theatre,” Tulane Drama Review 7, no. 2 (Winter 1962): 194–205. Although he does not mention the Living Theatre, Fred Kaplan’s book is fascinating and wide-ranging in its coverage of what was going on during this crucial year. Kaplan, 1959: The Year Everything Changed (New York: John Wiley, 2009).

2. All quotes in paragraph from Malina Journal, Violet Copy, 27 June, 1959, Living Theatre Records.

3. John Gruen, The Party’s Over Now: Reminiscences of the Fifties—New York’s Artists, Writers, Musicians, and Their Friends (New York: Pushcart, 1989), 100.

4. Gelber, The Connection (London: Faber & Faber, 1960), 14–15.

5. Gelber, Connection, 44, 27.

6. Gelber, Connection, 55.

7. Gelber, Connection, 15.

8. Larry Rivers, What Did I Do?: The Unauthorized Autobiography, with Arnold Weinstein (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 354.

9. Gelber, Connection, 41.

10. Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” (1958), in Kaprow, The Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 7, 9; Mildred L. Glimcher, Happenings: New York, 1958–1963 (New York: Monacelli, 2012), 36–37; Philip Ursprung, Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the Limits to Art, trans. Fiona Elliott (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 30–34. Beck and Malina were aware of Kaprow’s work. According to one historian, Beck had actors from The Connection participate in 18 Happenings. But they did not do so before the play opened, as Judith Rodenbeck argues in “Madness and Method: Before Theatricality,” Grey Room 13 (Autumn 2003): 67.

11. Gelber, Connection, 61.

12. Malina Journal, 25 March 1958, box 6, Living Theatre Records.

13. Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre (1972; repr., New York: Limelight, 1986), 13, 7–8. On the overall ideology of the Living Theatre, part R. D. Laing, part anarchism, part Artaud, see R. L. Montgomery, “The Idea(l) of the ‘Group’ in Radical Theatre: A Dramaturgical Analysis of Three American Theatre Groups of the 1960s” (PhD diss., University of Canterbury, 2002), 14–15.

14. Calta, “Theatre: World of Narcotics Addicts,” New York Times, 16 July 1959, 30.

15. Malina Journal, 1952, box 7, Living Theatre Records.

16. Hovhaness to Malina, 18 January 1954, Living Theatre Records. On her love affairs, see Malina, Journal, 152, 293; Tytell, Living Theatre, 98.

17. Tytell, Living Theatre, 133–35. On the arrests, see “31 Flouting Test Seized by Police,” New York Times, 16 June 1955, 19.

18. Malina and Beck, “Response to Arrest,” box 68, Living Theatre Records. On her incarceration, see Judith Malina, The Diaries of Judith Malina, 1947–1957 (New York: Grove, 1984), 441–62.

19. Malina, haiku, no date, ca. mid-1950s, box 125, Living Theatre Records.

20. Malina, “Journal,” 28 April 1958, box 6, Living Theatre Records.

21. Malina, “Transcript of Diaries,” 28 April 1958, First Computer Printout, box 13, Living Theatre Records.

22. Tytell, Living Theatre, 85, 92–98.

23. “Living Theatre Quits Premises,” New York Times, 12 December 1955, 38.

24. All quotes on building project come from Malina Journal, various entries, May 1957–January 1959, box 6, Living Theatre Records.

25. William Carlos Williams, Many Loves, and Other Plays (New York: New Directions, 1961), 90.

26. Brooks Atkinson, “Avant-Garde ‘Many Loves,’ ” New York Times, 14 January 1959, 28.

27. Tytell, Living Theatre, 153–54.

28. “Membership Application for The Living Theatre,” box 16, Gelber Papers, Fales Library, New York University.

29. Description of Gelber is in David Newman, “Four Make a Wave,” Esquire, April 1960, 46.

30. Gruen, Party’s Over, 97–98.

31. Charley Johnson, “A Local Connection,” Richmond Independent, 30 September 1959, in biographical clippings, Jack Gelber Papers, Fales Library, New York University.

32. Quoted in Gruen, Party’s Over, 95. See also Newman, “Four Make a Wave,” 46; Johnson, “Local Connection.”

33. “The Living Theatre at Cooper Union: A Symposium with William Coco, Jack Gelber, Karen Malpede, Richard Schechner and Michael Smith,” Drama Review 31, no. 3 (Autumn 1987), 107.

34. Jerry Tallmer, “Judith Malina Resurrects a Living Classic,” Villager, 21–27 January 2009, 1.

35. Gruen, Party’s Over, 98.

36. “Living Theatre at Cooper Square,” 108.

37. Malina, “Journals,” 22 May 1959; 16 April 1958, box 6, Living Theatre Records.

38. Malina, “Journals,” 26 May 1959, box 6, Living Theatre Records.

39. Malina, “Journals,” 24 July 1958; 6 March 1959, box 6, v. 3, Living Theatre Records; Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. M. C. Richards (New York: Grove, 1958), 42, 81.

40. Jim O’Connor, “The Connection is Junk,” New York Journal American, 16 July 1959; Judith Crist, “Review,” New York Herald Tribune, 16 July 1959, in “Scrapbooks,” box 17, folder 903, Jack Gelber Collection, Fales Library, New York University.

41. Malina, “Journals,” 23 July 1959, box 6, Living Theatre Records.

42. Malina, “Journals,” 25 March 1958; 26 January 1959, box 6, Living Theatre Records.

43. Malina, “Journals,” 13 August 1959, box 6, Living Theatre Records; Allen Ginsberg, “Letter to the Editor,” Village Voice, 2 September 1959, box 15, Jack Gelber Papers, Fales Library, New York University.

44. Malina, “Journals,” 4 August 1959, box 6, Living Theatre Records; Mailer quoted in Tytell, Living Theatre, 158.

45. Malina, “Journals,” 24 August 1959; 4 September 1959; 15 September 1959; 8, 9 October 1959, box 6, Living Theatre Records.

46. Kenneth Tynan, “Off-Broadway: Drug on the Market,” New Yorker, 6 October 1959, 126–29.

47. Malina, “Journals,” 9 October 1959, box 6, Living Theatre Records.

48. Robert Brustein, “Junkies and Jazz,” Theater, 28 September 1959, 29; Brustein, The Theatre of Revolt: Studies in Modern Drama from Ibsen to Genet (1964; repr., Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1991), 4, 8, 27, 30.

49. Atkinson, “The Connection,” New York Times, 7 February 1960, X1.

50. Tytell, Living Theatre, 164.

51. Gruen, Party’s Over, 101; Jack Gelber, “Julian Beck, Businessman,” Drama Review 30, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 6–29.

52. Malina, “Journals,” 24 November 1959, box 6, Living Theatre Records.

53. Respondent’s brief for the Court of Appeals, State of New York, box 16, folder 891, Gelber Papers, Fales Library, New York University.

54. The play is discussed in Tytell, Living Theatre, 179–90.

55. Tytell, Living Theatre, 187–200.

56. Patrick McDermott, “Portrait of an Actor, Watching: Antiphonal Feedback to the Living Theatre,” Drama Review 13, no. 3 (Spring 1969): 78.

57. William Borders, “Indecent Exposure Charged to Becks,” New York Times, 28 September 1968, 27.

58. Aldo Rostagno, We, The Living Theatre, with Julian Beck and Judith Malina (New York: Ballantine, 1970), 225–27. This book is a good compendium for the radical phase of the troupe.

Chapter 9

1. Accounts of the party and the stabbing, by Corsaro and others, are in Peter Manso, Mailer: His Life and Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 311–27; Adele Mailer, The Last Party: Scenes from My Life with Norman Mailer (New York: Barricade, 1997), 347–50; Carl Rollyson, The Lives of Norman Mailer: A Biography (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 135–41; J. Michael Lennon, Norman Mailer: A Double Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 280–83.

2. Harry T. Moore, “The Targets Are Square,” New York Times, 1 November 1959, BR 4; Gore Vidal, “The Norman Mailer Syndrome,” The Nation, 2 January 1960, available online at https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/the-norman-mailer-syndrome-by-gore-vidal; Manso, Mailer, 273.

3. Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959), 17–22. Critic Norman Podhoretz maintained that Mailer actually had the capacity to achieve his goal of capturing the historical moment. See Podhoretz, “Norman Mailer: The Embattled Vision,” in Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and After in American Writing (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1964), 178.

4. Norman Mailer, The Presidential Papers (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1963), 9.

5. Charles Poore, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, 24 May 1951, 33; Orville Prescott, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, 14 October 1955, 25.

6. Orville Prescott, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, 7 May 1948, 21. Prescott did take Mailer to task, however, for his use of “explicitly vile speech.”

7. Robert Guttwillig, “Dim Views through Fog,” New York Times, 13 November 1960, BR 68. Although Roth admired much in Mailer, his remarks on this day were intended to be critical, no doubt referring to Mailer’s dangerous public persona.

8. Manso, Mailer, 231.

9. Lennon, Double Life, 211–12.

10. Manso, Mailer, 291.

11. Mailer, Advertisements, 267.

12. Mailer, Advertisements, 229.

13. Mailer, Advertisements, 241.

14. Mary V. Dearborn, Mailer: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 156–58, 106, 132 for quote. Mailer was convicted of public drunkenness but acquitted of the more serious offense of disorderly conduct.

15. Mailer, Advertisements, 7, 219; Richard Poirier, The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages of Contemporary Life (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), xxi, 87.

16. Mailer, Advertisements, 249, 281, 288, 313.

17. Mailer, Advertisements, 21. For an account of the problematic nature of writers and celebrity, focusing on Mailer, see Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 1889–1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 336–38. Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up,” in The Crack-Up (New York: New Directions, 1964), 70.

18. Mailer, Advertisements, 22.

19. Mailer, Advertisements, 17, 19.

20. Mailer, Advertisements, 94.

21. See the contributions by Arvin, Trilling, and Mailer in “Our Country and Our Culture,” special issue, Partisan Review 19 (May–June 1952): 288, 319–26.

22. Mailer, Advertisements, 190.

23. On Mailer’s rivalry with Sartre see George Cotkin, Existential America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 184–85. Quotes are from Mailer, Advertisements, 424–25.

24. Mailer’s journal for various novel projects, quoted in Lennon, Double Life, 189.

25. Anatole Broyard, “A Portrait of the Hipster,” Partisan Review 15 (June 1948): 721–27.

26. Irving Howe, “This Age of Conformity,” Partisan Review 21 (January–February 1954): 31. Howe continued to admire the piece, although he regretted not excising the passage where Mailer thrills at the murder of an innocent man. Manso, Mailer, 254.

27. Mailer, Advertisements, 338.

28. Mailer, Advertisements, 339.

29. Cotkin, Existential America, 184–209.

30. On Mailer’s rather singular theology see Robert Solotaroff, “The Formulation Expanded: Mailer’s Existentialism,” in Down Mailer’s Way (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), 82–123.

31. “Existential Aesthetics,” interview with Laura Adams (1975), in Conversations with Norman Mailer, ed. J. Michael Lennon (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988), 213; Mailer, “Some Dirt in the Talk: A Candid History of an Existential Movie Called Wild 90,” Esquire, 19 December 1967, 194; Mailer, The Presidential Papers (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1963), 9, 26. In many ways, Mailer was trying to make the hipster into a new sort of indigenous American mythical hero. See Stanley T. Gutman, Mankind in Barbary: The Individual and Society in the Novels of Norman Mailer (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1975), 93ff.

32. Mailer, Advertisements, 349.

33. Mailer, Advertisements, 347.

34. Manso, 258.

35. Lennon, Double Life, 253.

36. Baldwin, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy” (1961), in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s/Marek, 1985), 290–303.

37. Morris Dickstein rightly places Mailer at the center of a shift toward a new sensibility. He further sees Mailer as upholding a moral imperative but displacing earlier moral ideals held by the bulk of the New York intellectuals. See Dickstein’s Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 51ff. On Mailer’s adherence to a strict moralism, see Diana Trilling, “The Radical Moralism of Norman Mailer,” in The Creative Present: Notes on Contemporary American Fiction, ed. Nona Balakian and Charles Simmons (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), 149–71.

38. Mailer, Advertisements, 463.

39. Mailer, Advertisements, 464–73.

40. Mailer, Advertisements, 472.

41. Styron to Jim and Gloria Jones, 24 March 1959, in Selected Letters of William Styron, ed. Rose Styron (New York: Random House, 2012), 263. Mailer quote, Advertisements, 472.

42. Dearborn, Mailer, 249.

43. Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (New York: New American Library, 1968). On this issue, see J. Michael Lennon, “Norman Mailer: Novelist, Journalist, or Historian?,” Journal of Modern Literature 30 (Fall 2006): 91–103.

44. Norman Mailer, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” in The Presidential Papers (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1963), 36, 33, 35.

45. Mailer, Presidential Papers, 39–40.

46. Mailer, Presidential Papers, 31.

47. Dearborn, Mailer, 150–51; Norman Mailer, Existential Errands (Boston: Little, Brown), 46–47.

48. Mailer, Presidential Papers, 54, 59.

49. Mailer, Presidential Papers, 48. Mailer’s account of Kennedy’s heroism came from Joe McCarthy, The Remarkable Kennedys (New York: Dial, 1960).

50. Mailer, Presidential Papers, 60.

51. Norman Mailer, An American Dream (New York: Dial, 1965).

Chapter 10

1. Dick Schaap, Flashing before My Eyes (New York: William Morrow, 2001), 69.

2. Lenny Bruce, “A Letter to Jack Carter,” 1 February 1961, in The Almost Unpublished Lenny Bruce: From the Private Collection of Kitty Bruce (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1984), 86. It is unclear if the letter was ever sent.

3. Paul Krassner, Confessions of a Raving Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counter-Culture (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 64.

4. “The Sickniks,” Time, 13 July 1959, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,869153,00.html.

5. Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (New York: Pantheon, 2003), 391; Stephen E. Kercher, Revel with a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 413.

6. Hardly surprising that an article on Bruce by Jonathan Miller was titled “The Sick White Negro,” Partisan Review 30 (Spring 1963): 149–55; for a less enthusiastic take on Bruce as a “white negro,” see Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1989), 89–92.

7. Albert Goldman, Ladies and Gentleman—Lenny Bruce!!, with Lawrence Schiller (New York: Penguin, 1974), 219.

8. Norman Mailer, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” in The Presidential Papers (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1963), 43.

9. Kercher, Revel, esp., 202–13.

10. Arthur and Barbara Gelb, “Culture Makes a Hit at the White House,” New York Times, 28 January 1962, 165; Mailer, “Superman,” 48.

11. On comedy in this period, see Kercher, Revel, and Nachman, Seriously Funny.

12. A quick biographical sketch is in Nachman, Seriously Funny, 397–401.

13. Honey Bruce, Honey: The Life and Loves of Lenny’s Shady Lady, with Dana Benenson, ed. Bob McKendrick (Chicago: Playboy, 1976), 154.

14. Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People: An Autobiography (Chicago: Playboy, 1965), 16.

15. L. Bruce, How to Talk Dirty, 23; Goldman, Ladies, 102, 86–117.

16. L. Bruce, How to Talk Dirty, 30.

17. L. Bruce, How to Talk Dirty, 38; Krassner, Confessions, 64.

18. Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen, 158, 323.

19. “lenny bruce,” YouTube, uploaded 11 November 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCplnUga0hU.

20. Gilbert Millstein, “Man, It’s Like Satire,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, 3 May 1959, 29; Arthur Gelb, “Comic Gives Socks with Moral,” New York Times, 8 May 1960, 44.

21. Frank Kofsky, Lenny Bruce: The Comedian as Social Critic and Secular Moralist (New York: Monad, 1974), 73; John Limon, Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or Abjection in America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 22.

22. Nachman, Seriously Funny, 393.

23. H. Bruce, Honey, 154.

24. John P. Shanley, “Lenny Bruce, ‘Beatnik,’ on ‘One Night Stand,’ ” New York Times, 13 May 1959, 75.

25. John Cohen, comp. and ed., The Essential Lenny Bruce (New York: Ballantine, [1967]), 31; Ioan Davies, “Lenny Bruce: Hyperrealism and the Death of Jewish Tragic Humor,” Social Text no. 22 (Spring 1989): 92–114; Maria Damon, “The Jewish Entertainer as Cultural Lightning Rod: The Case of Lenny Bruce,” Postmodern Culture 7, no. 2 (1997).

26. Arthur Steuer, “How to Talk Dirty and Influence People,” Esquire, November 1961, 155.

27. Orrin Keepnews, “The Existential Jazz Aura of Lenny Bruce,” Downbeat, 3 November 1966, 20.

28. L. Bruce, Almost Unpublished, 19.

29. Nat Hentoff, Free Speech for Me—But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 327. On “jazz modernism,” see Alfred Appel Jr., Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002).

30. Neil Schaeffer, “Lenny Bruce without Tears,” College English 37 (February 1976): 564.

31. L. Bruce, Almost Unpublished, 19; Miller, “Sick White Negro,” 150.

32. Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

33. Krassner, Confessions, 62.

34. Cohen, Essential, 15–19.

35. L. Bruce, Almost Unpublished, 13.

36. Krassner, Confessions, 69.

37. L. Bruce, Almost Unpublished, 18.

38. L. Bruce, Almost Unpublished, 29.

39. Lenny Bruce, “On the Great Debate,” The Realist, March/April 1961, 30; Krassner, Confessions, 71.

40. Ronald Sukenick, Down and In: Life in the Underground (New York: Beech Tree, 1987), 83.

41. Krassner, Confessions, 61. On the shock of Psycho and its revolutionary presence in American culture, see David Thomson, The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder (New York: Basic Books, 2009).

42. L. Bruce, How to Talk Dirty, 52–72.

43. Steuer, “How to Talk Dirty,” 155.

44. Nat Hentoff, “Satire, Schmatire,” Commonweal, 7 July 1961, 377.

45. L. Bruce, How to Talk Dirty, 96; William Karl Thomas, Lenny Bruce: The Making of a Prophet (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1989), 38–39. The routine appears on his 1959 album.

46. Cohen, Essential, 30.

47. Cohen, Essential, 11–12. Bruce was one of the few comedians, white or black, until Richard Pryor that employed the word in routines. See Randall Kennedy, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (New York: Pantheon, 2002), 38–39.

48. Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen, 351, 375.

49. Articles in San Francisco Chronicle, 4 October 1961, 8, 9.

50. Ronald K. L. Collins and David M. Skover, The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2002), 47ff.; Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen, 380–81.

51. Ralph J. Gleason, “Lenny Bruce’s Obscene Language Pinch in Frisco after Philly Rap,” Variety, 11 October, 1961, 64.

52. Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen, 382–84; Gleason, “Bruce’s Obscene Language,” 61; “Cops Seize Lenny Bruce—‘Dirty Talk,’ ” San Francisco Chronicle, 5 October 1961, 1; “Hotel Heave-Ho Caps Lenny Bruce’s Day,” ibid., 1.

53. Goldman, Ladies and Gentlemen, 403–404. For information on the Ginsberg trial, see chapter 5.

54. Collins and Skover, Trials, 67–75.

55. Richard H. Kuh, Foolish Figleaves?: Pornography in—and Out of—Court (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 175 ff.; see chapter 13 for more on Flaming Creatures.

Chapter 11

1. “The Blockade: The U.S. Puts It on the Line,” Life, 2 November 1962, 35.

2. Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), xii. Other quotes on the crisis come from this text. Also useful are: Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Margot A. Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

3. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1993), 98.

4. Letter quoted in Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties (New York: Broadway, 2008), 194–95.

5. Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 56.

6. Arthur Herzog, “Report on a ‘Think Factory,’ ” New York Times, 10 November 1963, 46.

7. Norman Podhoretz, “Herman Kahn and the Unthinkable,” in Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and After in American Writing (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964), 315.

8. Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 101.

9. Herman Kahn, Thinking about the Unthinkable (New York: Horizon, 1962), 21; Ghamari-Tabrizi, Worlds of Herman Kahn, 41–45. By the end of the month, another book on nuclear war would appear, Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s Fail-Safe (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962).

10. Excellent on Kuhn is Paul Hoynigen-Huene, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science, trans. Alexander T. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). For Kuhn’s explanation of the limits of his theory, see various essays by him in his book The Road since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970–1993, with an Autobiographical Interview, ed. James Conant and John Haugeland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). For one example of how art critics employed Kuhn, see Caroline A. Jones, “The Modernist Paradigm: The Artworld and Thomas Kuhn,” Critical Inquiry 26 (Spring 2000): 488–528.

11. Richard Rorty, “Thomas Kuhn, Rocks, and the Laws of Physics,” Common Knowledge 6 (Spring 1997): 8.

12. John F. Kennedy, Economic Report of the President to the Congress (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1962), 5; George Cotkin, “The Commerce of Culture and Criticism,” in Mark C. Carnes, ed., The Columbia History of Post–World War II America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 182.

13. W. J. Rorabaugh, Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), xviii. The period, especially around 1962, was marked by increased criticism of various institutions and practices, in Rachel Carson’s work on the chemical abuse of the environment, Michael Harrington’s exposure of the extent of poverty, Jane Jacobs on how developers undermined neighborhoods, to name but a few. And, a new organization, Students for a Democratic Society, began that year.

14. “Arts and Culture in the Kennedy White House,” JFK Library website, http://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/JFK-in-History/Arts-and-Culture-in-the-Kennedy-White-House.aspx; “Heckscher Gets Post,” New York Times, 23 February 1962, 37.

15. Quoted in Ray J. Haberski Jr., “It’s Only a Movie”: Films and Critics in American Culture (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), ix.

16. Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (New York: Paul B. Hoeber, 1961), ix–x. Szasz’s new concept for psychiatry was a sort of game-theory model linked with medicine, therapy, and “ethical, political, religious, and social considerations.” Norman O. Brown, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (New York: Vintage, 1959), 322, xii–xiv, 174.

17. Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (New York: Viking, 2012), 218. Also fitting into this fascination with madness could be Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire (1962).

18. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (New York: Knopf, 1998), 136. For another poet in this mode, see chapter 15 on Anne Sexton.

19. Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (New York: HarperPerennial, 2008), 235, 245.

20. On Sexton see Diane Wood Middlebrook, Anne Sexton: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991); Sexton to Tillie Olsen (Spring 1962), in Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 139. The poem is in The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton (New York: Mariner, 1999), 108.

21. Sexton to Farrell (16 July 1962), in Sexton, Self-Portrait, 144.

22. George Cotkin, “The Hate Stare,” in Morality’s Muddy Waters: Ethical Quandaries in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), quote on 119.

23. Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2003), 3; Jennifer Scanlon, Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 58, 86.

24. Brown, Sex, 226.

25. Henry Miller, “The Art of Fiction no. 28,” interviewed by George Wickes, Paris Review, Summer-Fall 1962, available online at http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4597/the-art-of-fiction-no-28-henry-miller.

26. Edward de Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius (New York: Random House, 1992), 391.

27. William Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, ed. James Grauerholz and Barry Miller (New York: Grove, 2001), 105.

28. E. R. Hutchinson, Tropic of Cancer on Trial: A Case History of Censorship (New York: Grove, 1968), 97–98, 83.

29. James Brown, James Brown: The Godfather of Soul, with Bruce Tucker (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 135.

30. R. J. Smith, The One: The Life and Music of James Brown (New York: Gotham, 2012), 113.

31. Doug Wolk, Live at the Apollo (New York: Continuum, 2011); James Brown, “Live at the Apollo,” Polydor 2482 184, 2004, compact disk.

32. Marc Eliot, “Introduction,” in James Brown, I Feel Good: A Memoir of a Life of Soul (New York: New American Library, 2005), 29.

33. Brown, I Feel Good, 126–27.

34. Brown, Godfather, 153.

35. Martin Munro, Different Drummers: Rhythm and Race in the Americas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 189.

36. Steve Binder, dir., T.A.M.I. Show, (Los Angeles: Dick Clark Productions, 2009), DVD.

Chapter 12

1. Matisse quote in Kenneth Goldsmith, I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004), xvii.

2. Arthur C. Danto, “Soup to Butts,” Artforum 41, no. 1 (September 2002): 51. See also Louis Menand, “Top of the Pops: Did Andy Warhol Change Everything?,” New Yorker, 11 January 2010, 57–65;

3. Like so much associated with Warhol, it is difficult to discern the authenticity of his reactions and accounts of it. For him being deeply affected by the Kennedy assassination, see Tony Scherman and David Dalton, POP: The Genius of Andy Warhol (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 185 and Victor Bockris, The Life and Death of Andy Warhol (New York: Bantam, 1989), 140. According to Warhol, while he liked Kennedy, his reaction was restrained; mostly he claimed to have been upset that everyone was being made by television and radio to feel sad. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ’60s (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 60.

4. Peter Selz, “Pop Goes the Artist,” Partisan Review 20 (Summer 1963): 314.

5. Thomas B. Hess, “The Phony Crisis in American Art,” Art News 62, no. 4 (Summer 1963): 27.

6. Fairfield Porter, “The Education of Jasper Johns,” Art News 62, no. 10 (February 1964): 62.

7. Rosenberg quoted in Melissa Mayer, Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston (New York: Penguin, 1988), 150.

8. Barbara Rose, “Dada: Then and Now,” Art International 2, no. 1 (25 January 1963): 27–28.

9. Stuart Preston, “Old and New Ways of Seeing Things,” New York Times, 26 April 1964, X21.

10. Quoted in Caroline A. Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 22.

11. Henry Geldzahler, quoted in Calvin Tomkins, “Moving with the Flow,” New Yorker, 6 November 1971, 87.

12. Bockris, Life and Death, 60.

13. Hal Foster, “Death in America,” October 75 (Winter 1996): 37.

14. Henry J. Seldis, “In the Galleries,” Los Angeles Times, 13 July 1962, section 4, 6.

15. Goldsmith, I’ll Be Your Mirror, 18. On his Campbell’s Soup cans, see Gary Indiana, Andy Warhol and the Can That Sold the World (New York: Perseus, 2010).

16. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 44.

17. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 13, 15.

18. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1975), 101.

19. Andy Warhol “Giant” Size (London: Phaidon, 2006), 186.

20. Andreas Huyssen, “The Cultural Politics of Pop,” in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 146.

21. Cecile Whiting, A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Alice Goldfarb Marquis, The POP! Revolution (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2010); Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1956–1965,” in Andy Warhol, ed. Annette Michelson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 1–48; Christin J. Mamiya, Pop Art and Consumer Culture: American Super Market (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992); John Canaday, “Pop Art Sells On and On—Why?,” New York Times, 31 May 1964, SM7, 48, 52–53; Stuart Preston, “On Display: All-Out Series of Pop Art,” New York Times, 21 March, 1963, 8.

22. R. Glaisek, “Letter to the Editor,” Art News 62, no. 7 (November 1963): 6.

23. Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy 61 (October 1964): 571–84; Danto, “The Art World Revisited: Comedies of Similarity,” in Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 33–53; Andy Warhol (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

24. David Lubin, Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 33–37, 256. Lubin does reference Warhol, with a comparison between his films and the Zapruder recording of the assassination.

25. Andy Warhol, “What is Pop Art?,” interview with G. R. Swenson, Art News, November 1962, 26.

26. Paul Mattick, “The Andy Warhol of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Andy Warhol,” Critical Inquiry 24 (Summer 1998): 966–67.

27. Kevin Cook, Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014); Theodore Hamm, Rebel and a Cause: Caryl Chessman and the Politics of the Death Penalty in Postwar California, 1948–1974 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

28. David Thomson, The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder (New York: Basic Books, 2009).

29. Margot A. Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 197; Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster” (1965), in Against Interpretation (New York: Picador, 1990), 209–25.

30. Henry Geldzahler, Making It New: Essays, Interviews, and Talks (New York: Turtle Point, 1994), 359–60.

31. John Wilcock, The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol ed. Christopher Trela (New York: Trela, 2010), 67.

32. Raymond M. Herbenick, Andy Warhol’s Religious and Ethnic Roots: The Carpatho-Rusyn Influence on His Art (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1997), 89ff.

33. Biographical material is drawn from Bockris, Life and Death, 6–50; Scherman and Dalton, Pop, 1–15; Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up; An Insider’s Portrait (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 10–20; David Bourdon, Warhol (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989).

34. New York Times, 18 April 1956, 34; Bourdon, Warhol, 42; Glaser quoted in Scherman and Dalton, Pop, 15.

35. Goldsmith, I’ll Be Your Mirror, 19, 88.

36. Jennifer Dyer, “The Metaphysics of the Mundane: Understanding Andy Warhol’s Serial Imagery,” Artibus et Historiae 25, no. 49 (2004): 41.

37. Warhol “Giant,” 184.

38. Scherman and Dalton, Pop, 162–64; Warhol “Giant,” 254–55.

39. David McCarthy, “Andy Warhol’s Silver Elvises: Meaning through Context at the Ferus Gallery in 1963,” Art Bulletin 88, no. 2 (June 2006): 355–56.

40. McCarthy, “Andy Warhol’s Silver Elvises,” 357.

41. Warhol “Giant,” 190–91, 197.

42. Quoted in Bennett Capers, “On Andy Warhol’s Electric Chair,” California Law Review 94, no. 1 (January 2006): 249.

43. In 1964 Warhol supported Robert F. Kennedy’s successful campaign for senator in New York. “We’re for Robert Kennedy,” New York Times, 27 October 1964, 25.

44. Thomas Crow, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol,” in Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 62–63. On Warhol as humanist see Gregory Battock, “Humanism and Reality: Thek and Warhol,” (1965) in The New Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battock, (New York: Dutton, 1973), 15.

45. Warhol “Giant,” 236–37; Anne M. Wagner, “Warhol Paints History, or Race in America” Representations 55 (Summer 1966): 98–119.

46. Warhol “Giant,” 232–33.

47. Goldsmith, I’ll Be Your Mirror, 94.

48. Jonas Mekas, “Notes on the New American Cinema,” (1962) in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Cooper Square, 2000), 104, 107.

49. Steven Watson, Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties (New York: Pantheon, 2003), 97; John Wilcock, The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol, ed. Christopher Trela (New York: Trela, 2010), 54.

50. Watson, Factory Made, 117–19; Amy Taubin, “****,” in Who Is Andy Warhol?, ed. Colin McCabe (London: British Film Institute, 1997), 24–25.

51. Bockris, Life and Death, 131–32.

52. Watson, Factory Made, 104–5.

53. Wayne Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol (New York: Viking, 2001), 13.

54. See comments by Charles Henri Ford in Wilcock, Autobiography, 57, 62.

55. John Yau, In the Realm of Appearances: The Art of Andy Warhol (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1993), 77.

56. Stephen Koch, Stargazer: The Life, World and Films of Andy Warhol (New York: Marion Boyars, 2002), 35–36. On Warhol’s films, also see Douglas Crimp, “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); J. J. Murphy, The Black Hole of the Camera: The Films of Andy Warhol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

57. Wilcock, Autobiography, 246; Mead quoted in Branden W. Joseph, “The Play of Repetition: Andy Warhol’s Sleep,” Grey Room 19 (Spring 2005): 23.

58. Watson, Factory Made, 160–61; Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 42.

Chapter 13

1. “Taste,” Time, 11 December 1964, 75.

2. Susan Sontag, “Opinion Please from New York,” Mademoiselle, April 1965, 58–60.

3. On Sontag, see Liam Kennedy, Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995); Phillip Lopate, Notes on Sontag (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock, Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).

4. Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963, ed. David Rieff (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008), 30.

5. Sontag, Reborn, 18.

6. Sontag, “The Letter Scene,” New Yorker, 18 August 1986, 28.

7. Susan Rieff, “Dialogue” (August 1952), coll. 612, box 146, folder 1, Susan Sontag Papers, Charles Young Research Library, UCLA (hereafter Sontag Papers).

8. Sontag, Reborn, 128.

9. Sontag, Reborn, 140, 98–99, 135, 193.

10. Judith Grossman, Her Own Terms (New York: Soho, 1988), 222.

11. Sontag, Reborn, 157, 166, 177. On Sontag’s life in Paris, see Alice Kaplan, Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012) 81–141.

12. Sontag, Reborn, 175, 187, 205.

13. Sontag, Reborn, 157, 166, 177. On Sontag’s life in Paris, see Kaplan, Dreaming in French, 81–141.

14. Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964–1980, ed. David Rieff (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2012), 25; on her torturous love life, see Edward Field, The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 161ff.

15. Sontag, Consciousness, 25, 30; Sontag, “Journals,” (8 September 1964), box 125, folder 1, Sontag Papers.

16. Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990), 14.

17. Sontag, “Journal” (4 January 1966), box 125, folder 4, Sontag Papers.

18. Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde, Performance, and the Effervescent Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).

19. Sayre, Object, 109.

20. Cage’s influence cannot be overstated. See, for example, Liz Kotz, Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 59ff.

21. Holland Cotter, “Most Wanted, Most Haunted,” New York Times, 25 April 2014, 21, 25. On one venue for much of the experimental work occurring in New York City, see Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964 (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1993).

22. Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Remembering Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece,” Oxford Art Journal 26, no. 1 (2003): 99–123. Video of one performance is available online, “Yoko Ono—Cut Piece (1965),” YouTube, uploaded 28 February 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYJ3dPwa2tI. Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 10–14.

23. Maurice Berger, Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 82–83; Yvonne Rainer, Feelings Are Facts: A Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 244. The piece can be seen online at http://artforum.com/video/mode=large&id=31196. This was the period when minimalism became central, with its challenge to abstract expressionist ideals of the meaning of the artwork and the artist. For a key statement of this movement, see Donald Judd, “Specific Artists” (1965), in American Artists on Art: From 1940 to 1980, ed. Ellen H. Johnson (New York: Icon, 1982), 105–11.

24. Carolee Schneemann, Imagining Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 60–74; Schneemann to James Tenney (30 May 1964), in Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle, ed. Kristine Styles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 83–84. One version of the piece can be seen online at http://artforum.com/video/mode=large&id=31196; Schneemann to Jean-Jacques Lebel (7 February 1966), in Styles, Correspondence Course, 100. Meat Joy was first performed in Paris.

25. Schneemann to Moorman (26 September 1980), in Styles, Correspondence Course, 323.

26. Mikal Gilmore, “How the Beatles Took America,” Rolling Stone, 16 January 2014, 41–47, 69.

27. Leo Steinberg, “Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public,” in Other Criteria (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 5.

28. Harold Rosenberg, The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience (New York: Horizon, 1964), 53, 61–75.

29. Barbara Rose, “ABC ART,” Art in America 53, no. 9 (October 1965): 58–69. On some similar themes, see the essay by Ivan C. Karp, “Anti-Sensibility Painting” (1963), in Pop Art: A Critical History, ed. Steven Henry Madoff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 89.

30. David Newman and Robert Benton, “The New Sentimentality,” Esquire, July, 1964, 25–28.

31. Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965), xvii.

32. Benjamin DeMott, “The Age of Overkill,” New York Times Magazine, 19 May 1968, 104. See also DeMott, Supergrow: Essays and Reports on Imagination in America (New York: Dell, 1969).

33. Richard Gilman, The Confusion of Realms (New York: Random House, 1969).

34. Not being historians, neither of them realized that the essentials of this New Sensibility had been stirring in American Culture since at least 1952.

35. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation, 276.

36. On Trilling, see Leland Poague, “Introduction,” in Susan Sontag: An Annotated Bibliography, 1948–1992, ed. Leland Poague and Kathy A. Parsons (New York: Garland, 2000), lxi. In a sense, she was also aligning herself with aspects of Clement Greenberg’s views about the artist exploring the nature of the medium rather than focusing on content. Thus, she remarks: “I recall that when I wrote ‘Notes on Camp,’ I had in the back of my mind as both a role model and anti-model Clement Greenberg’s very influential “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Sontag to Michael Kammen (4 Sept. 1992), box 164, folder 2, Sontag Papers. On this connection, see Kennedy, Mind as Passion, 23–29. See also James Penner, “Gendering Susan Sontag’s Criticism in the 1960s: The New York Intellectuals, the Counter Culture, and the Kulturkampf over ‘The New Sensibility,’ ” Women’s Studies 37 (2008): 921–41. Sontag, “Journals” (3 January 1966), box 125, folder 4; (circa 1965), box 125, folder 2, Sontag Papers. In fact, Trilling could sometimes sound like Sontag in his opposition to earlier left criticism. The theme is resplendent in Trilling, who upholds against the moral predictability of the old left, moral tragedy, complexity, variousness, and irony. See Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Tradition (New York: Viking, 1950), xiv.

37. Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation, 276.

38. The problem with camp was that it any ethical aspects. For more on this, see Kennedy, Mind as Passion, 33–35. Also, Daniel Schreiber, Susan Sontag: A Biography trans. David Dollenmayer (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 78–83.

39. Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation, 278.

40. Barbara Ching and Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, “Introduction,” in The Scandal of Susan Sontag ed. Barbara Ching and Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 3. Sontag, “Afterword: Thirty Years Later,” in Against Interpretation, 309.

41. On Sontag as evangelist see Burton Feldman, “Evangelist of the New,” Denver Quarterly 1 (Spring 1966): 152–56; on her success see Rollyson and Paddock, Sontag, 102; Sohnya Sayres, Susan Sontag: The Elegiac Modernist (New York: Routledge, 1990), 34. For reviews see Benjamin DeMott, “Lady on the Scene,” New York Times, 23 January 1966, 239; Eliot Fremont-Smith, “After the Ticker Tape Parade,” New York Times, 31 January 1966, 28; Robert Mazzocco, “Swingtime,” New York Review of Books, 9 June 1966, available online at http://nybooks.com/articles/archives/1966/jun/09/swingtime. It should be noted that the titles and content of these reviews focus on the hip, swinger image of Sontag in the arts.

42. Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 7.

43. Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 9.

44. Sontag, “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” in Against Interpretation, 300.

45. Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989); Paul R. Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

46. Sontag, “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” 303.

47. Susan Sontag, “Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures,” in Against Interpretation, 227, 230–31.

48. As Phillip Lopate notes, “She romanticized male depression as an aristocratic retreat.” Lopate, Notes on Sontag, 114.

49. Sontag. “Journals” (notes, 1965), box 125, folder 6, Sontag Papers; Sontag, Consciousness, 42. Last quote is in Schreiber, Susan Sontag, 75.

50. Sontag, “Marat/Sade/Artaud,” in Against Interpretation, 168–69.

51. Sontag, “The Pornographic Imagination,” in Styles of Radical Will (1969; repr., New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002), 43–48.

52. Tom Wolfe, “The New Journalism,” in The New Journalism (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 29.

53. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ‘60s (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 70; Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed, 78.

54. Lopate, Notes on Sontag, 32; Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed, 83, 73.

55. Leslie Fiedler, “The New Mutants,” Partisan Review 32 (Fall 1965): 509.

56. Fiedler, “New Mutants,” 511, 523, 524; Mark Royden, Too Good to Be True: The Life and Work of Leslie Fiedler (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002).

57. Susan Sontag, “What’s Happening in America” (1966), in Styles of Radical Will, 195, 203.

58. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up,” in The Crack-Up (New York: New Directions, 1964), 69.

59. Not all critics, of course, registered appreciation for the experimentalism of the New Sensibility. In a far-ranging piece titled “The New York Intellectuals,” Irving Howe blasted it for anti-institutionalism, refusal to compromise, violence, anti-intellectualism, and more. It “makes nihilism,” he concluded, “seem casual, good natured, even innocent.” From his perspective; it was modernism run amok. Howe, “The New York Intellectuals,” in The Decline of the New (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), 248ff. In this same vein, see Daniel Bell, “The Sensibility of the Sixties,” in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976). The New Sensibility, he writes, is the name for the ideology of the counterculture, with its “attack on reason itself.” And, he further relates, “What the new sensibility did was to carry the premises of modernism through to their logical conclusions” (143). For a more ambivalent take see Fiedler, “New Mutants.” Excellent on all of this is Robert Boyers, “On Susan Sontag and the New Sensibility,” Salmagundi 1 (1966): 27–38.

60. Sontag, “Afterword,” 308–12. On the potential of the New Sensibility, at least in its sexual openness, see Herbert Marcuse, “The New Sensibility,” in An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 23–48. For her revised views on reading, see the excellent essay by Joan Acocella, “The Hunger Artist,” in Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays (New York: Vintage, 2008), 450.

61. Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). This is related to questions about the power, persistence, and cooptation of the avant-garde, an issue that is highly complex and contentious. For an excellent summary of these concerns, see Mike Sell, Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008).

62. Susan Sontag, “Trip to Hanoi,” in Radical Will, 224.

Chapter 14

1. Quoted in Clinton Heylin, Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades (New York: Summit, 1991), 143–45.

2. Quoted in Mike Marqusee, Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s (New York: Seven Stories, 2005), 151.

3. Howard Sounes, Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan (New York: Grove, 2011), 180–85; Robert Shelton, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 306. See also Jim Miller, “Bob Dylan,” in The Dylan Companion, ed. Elizabeth Thompson and David Gutman (New York: Da Capo, 2001), 18; Marqusee, Wicked Messenger, 149–55; Ian Bell, Once Upon a Time: The Lives of Bob Dylan (New York: Pegasus, 2012), 359–72. For a skeptical account of the booing, see David Hajdu, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), 210–12.

4. Quoted in Greil Marcus, Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), 154.

5. Muldaur quote in Nigel Williamson, The Rough Guide to Bob Dylan (London: Metro, 2006), 48.

6. Shelton, No Direction Home, 303, 306.

7. Frank Kofsky, John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), 232–33.

8. Louise Davis Stone, “The Jazz Bit: A Chat with John Coltrane,” in Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane Interviews, ed. Chris DeVito (Chicago: Chicago Review, 2010), 222.

9. Michael Hennessey, “Dropping the Ball and Chain from Jazz,” in DeVito, Coltrane on Coltrane, 239; Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2007), 96–97.

10. Lewis Porter, John Coltrane: His Life and Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 229–30.

11. Howard Mandel, comment to Alex W. Rodriguez, “Share Your John Coltrane Stories,” Lubricity (blog), 7 May 2009, http://lubricity.wordpress.com/2011/05/01/share-your-john-coltrane-stories/.

12. For Dylan at Newport, see Marcus, Like a Rolling Stone, 254–59. See also Alan Light, “Bob Dylan as Performer,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan, ed. Kevin J. H. Dettmer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 59–60.

13. Dan Morgenstern quoted in The John Coltrane Companion: Five Decades of Commentary, ed. Carl Woideck (New York: Schirmer, 1999), 222.

14. Porter, Coltrane, 266.

15. Interview with Nat Hentoff, New Yorker, 24 October 1964, in Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews, ed. Jonathan Cott (New York: Wenner, 2006), 22.

16. Williamson, Rough Guide, 44.

17. Bob Spitz, “The Mad Years,” in Dylan: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 267–368.

18. As recalled by Harold Lovette in J. C. Thomas, Chasin’ The Train: The Music and Mystique of John Coltrane (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975), 104.

19. Iain Anderson, This is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 63.

20. LeRoi Jones, “New Tenor Archie Shepp Talking,” in Black Music (New York: William Morrow, 1967), 151–52, 154.

21. Porter, Coltrane, 38.

22. Thomas Meehan, “Public Writer no. 1?,” New York Times Magazine, 12 December 1965, 45.

23. Coltrane was deeply influenced by Ornette Coleman; see Porter, Coltrane, 202–5.

24. Coltrane interviewed by Michel Delorme and Claude Lenissois, “Coltrane: Star of Antibes: ‘I Can’t Go Farther,’ ” Nat Hentoff, “Meditations Liner Notes,” both in DeVito, Coltrane on Coltrane, 246, 264.

25. Anthony DeCurtis, “Bob Dylan as Songwriter,” in Dettmer, Cambridge Companion, 48; Bell, Once Upon a Time, 342.

26. On the question of influence, arguing for Coltrane’s effect on Ayler, see Kofsky, Jazz Revolution, 293–321. On Coltrane’s sound see Thomas, Chasin’, 106. Around this time, Phil Spector was developing his signature “wall of sound” in pop recordings.

27. James T. Patterson, The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America (New York: Basic Books, 2012).

28. Kael quoted in Brian Kellow, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark (New York: Viking, 2011), 95. The stridency of her review contributed to Kael’s being dismissed as movie critic for McCall’s magazine.

29. Bill Cole, John Coltrane (New York: Schirmer, 1976), 150.

30. Scott Saul, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 224–43. For a strong statement of the new aesthetic see Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle Jr. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 272–90.

31. Ralph Ellison, “Review of Blues People,” in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 286.

32. On expectations regarding Coltrane see Saul, Freedom Is, 224–25.

33. On the complexities of identity with Dylan in this period, see Barry Shank, “ ‘That Wild Mercury Sound’: Bob Dylan and the Illusion of American Culture,” Boundary 2 29, no. 1 (2002): 97–123.

34. Andrew Sarris, “Don’t Look Back,” in Thompson and Gutman, Dylan Companion, 88. On the song and Zantzinger see Marqusee, Wicked Messenger, 89; historian Peter Bacon Hales remarked that “atomic anxiety pervaded” Dylan’s early work. Hales, Outside the Gates of Eden: The Dream of America from Hiroshima to Now (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 259.

35. Bell, Once Upon a Time, 377.

36. Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties (New York: Broadway, 2008), 243.

37. Quoted in Tony Whyton, Beyond A Love Supreme: John Coltrane and the Legacy of an Album (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 22.

38. Thomas, Chasin’, 183–84; the score can be viewed online at: http://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/love-supreme-manuscripts.jpg.

39. Ratliff, Story of a Sound, 51.

40. The liner notes and poem for the album are available in DeVito, Coltrane on Coltrane, 225–28.

41. Porter, Coltrane, 232.

42. “Liner Notes,” in DeVito, Coltrane on Coltrane, 227–28.

43. Jimm Cushing, personal communication, 8 November 2013.

44. Thomas, Chasin’, 171–72.

45. Thomas, Chasin’, 118; Porter, Coltrane, 258. Coltrane was also well read in musical theory; he was once referred to as “theory mad.” Ratliff, Story of a Sound, 51; Michel Delorme and Claude Lenissois, “Coltrane, Star of Antibes: ‘I Can’t Go Farther,’ ” in DeVito, Coltrane on Coltrane, 244.

46. Quoted in Ashley Kahn, A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album (New York: Viking, 2002), 77. Kahn is excellent on the album. The most technical analysis of A Love Supreme is in Porter, Coltrane, 231–49.

47. Kahn, A Love Supreme, 84.

48. Kahn, A Love Supreme, 86, 92–93.

49. Jones quoted in Kahn, A Love Supreme, x.

50. Kahn, A Love Supreme, 102.

51. Kahn, A Love Supreme, 104.

52. Cole, Coltrane, 160.

53. Marcus, Like a Rolling Stone, 87–151; Bell, Once Upon a Time, 18–20, 401–10. Bell finds the song “bitter and vengeful” but somehow “joyous.”

54. Williamson, Rough Guide, 298.

55. For a discussion of the recording sessions, take by take, see Marcus, Rolling Stone, 203–25.

56. Lyrics for all of Dylan’s songs are available at the official Bob Dylan website, http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs.

57. Williamson, Rough Guide, 297.

58. Shelton, No Direction Home, 285.

59. Heylin, Behind the Shades, 153–54; Michael Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (New York: Continuum, 2006), 603–4.

60. On Dylan as existentialist see Shelton, No Direction Home, 269–70.

61. Williamson, Rough Guide, 49.

62. Bob Dylan, Chronicles (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 288.

63. For Dylan as a poet of talent see Christopher Ricks, Dylan’s Visions of Sin (New York: Ecco, 2005) and Frank Kermode and Stephen Spender, “The Metaphor at the End of the Funnel” (1972), in Thompson and Gutman, Dylan Companion, 155–62.

64. Shelton, No Direction Home, 227.

65. Interview with Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston (August 1965), in Cott, Essential Interviews, 49.

66. Nicholl, “Just Like the Night,” in Thompson and Gutman, Dylan Companion, 123; the song, originally titled “Freeze Out,” was recorded in October 1965, with his new backup group, “The Hawks,” and appeared on the double-album Blonde on Blonde. See Sean Wilentz, Bob Dylan in America (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 111–12. On his writing it and the session recording it, see Heylin, Behind the Shades, 144–45. On Glamour (June 1966) see Greil Marcus, Bob Dylan: Writings, 1968–2010 (New York: Public Affairs, 2010), 377.

67. On the complexities of deciphering Dylan in a work such as “Visions of Johanna,” see Bell, Once Upon a Time, 432–33. By 1966, Dylan had become awed by Allen Ginsberg’s poetry and person. See the interview with Robert Shelton (March 1966), in Cott, Essential Interviews, 86–87.

68. Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 351.

69. Cole, Coltrane, 169.

70. Quoted in John Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cold: Jazz and Its Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 254. The same designation might, of course, be applied to Dylan’s voice.

71. John S. Wilson, “Jazz and the Anarchy of the Avant-Garde,” New York Times, 24 April 1966, X23.

72. Eric Nisenson, Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest (New York: DaCapo, 1995), is excellent. Tommy L. Lott, “When Bar Walkers Preach: John Coltrane and the Crisis of the Black Intellectual,” in John Coltrane & Black America’s Quest for Freedom, ed. Leonard L. Brown (Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 2010), 107–8. For a brief musical analysis of the different versions of Ascension, see Porter, Coltrane, 262–63.

73. Frank Kofsky, “Interview with John Coltrane” (18 August 1966), in DeVito, Coltrane on Coltrane, 285. On the complexities of understanding both Ascension and Meditation in their various recordings, see Anthony Brown, “John Coltrane as the Personification of Spirituality in Black Music,” in Brown, Black America’s Quest for Freedom, 55–71.

74. Hentoff, “Meditations Liner Notes,” in DeVito, Coltrane on Coltrane, 263–64.

75. Kofsky, “Interview,” 295.

76. Nat Hentoff, “Live at the Village Vanguard Again!: Liner Notes,” in DeVito, Coltrane on Coltrane, 321.

77. “Interviews with John Coltrane,” in DeVito, Coltrane on Coltrane, 272; on the final stage of Coltrane’s musical journey, Expressions, see Nisenson, Ascension, 266–68.

Chapter 15

1. Sexton to Lois Ames, 19 November 1966, in Anne Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters, ed. Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 305.

2. Anne Sexton, “The Break,” in The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton (New York: Mariner, 1999), 190; Diane Wood Middlebrook, Anne Sexton: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 266.

3. Middlebrook discusses the affair but uses a pseudonym for Duhl. See Middlebrook, Sexton, 258–66;Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2011), 142.

4. Sexton, “For My Lover Returning to His Wife,” in Sexton, Complete Poems, 189, 190.

5. Quoted in Middlebrook, Sexton, 259, 261.

6. Mona Van Duyn, “Review of Love Poems,” in Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics, ed. J. D. McClatchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 141.

7. Linda Gray Sexton, Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide; A Memoir (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2011), 47. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932), 7.

8. Sexton to Farrell (16 July 1962). in Sexton, Self-Portrait, 144.

9. Robert Lowell, Life Studies and For the Union Dead (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990), 82; Lowell, “Anne Sexton,” in McClatchy, The Artist and Her Critics, 71.

10. Ben Howard, “Reviews,” in McClatchy, The Artist and Her Critics, 177.

11. Jo Gill, Anne Sexton’s Confessional Poetics (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), 4, 10–17; J. D. McClatchy, “Anne Sexton: Somehow to Endure,” in McClatchy, The Artist and Her Critics, 247; L. G. Sexton, Mercy Street, 35.

12. L. G. Sexton, Mercy Street, 112.

13. Middlebrook, Sexton, 62. For negative assessments of the celebrity status achieved by Sexton and others via their confessional poetry, see David Haven Blake, “Public Dreams: Berryman, Celebrity, and the Culture of Confession,” American Literary History 13 (Winter 2001): 716–36, esp. 719; Charles Molesworth, “ ‘With Your Own Face On’: The Origins and Consequences of Confessional Poetry,” Twentieth-Century Literature 22 (May 1976): 163–78.

14. Karen Alkalay-Gut, “The Dream Life of Ms. Dog: Anne Sexton’s Revolutionary Use of Pop Culture,” College Literature 32 (Fall 2005): 50–73.

15. Claire Pollard, “Her Kind: Anne Sexton, the Cold War and the Idea of the Housewife,” Critical Quarterly 48 (Autumn 2006): 1–24.

16. L. G. Sexton, Mercy Street, 55–64.

17. Maxine Kumin, “A Friendship Remembered,” in Kumin, To Make a Prairie: Essays on Poets, Poetry, and Country Living (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979), 92.

18. Anne Sexton, “Typewritten Biography,” reproduced in Arthur Furst, Anne Sexton: The Last Summer (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 4. For details on her early years, turn to Middlebrook, Sexton, 1–30.

19. Sexton, “Interview with Patricia Marx,” in No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose, ed. Steven E. Colburn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), 70.

20. Sexton, “Interview with Patricia Marx,” 80–81.

21. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 15, 317, 314.

22. Sheila Tobias, “Betty Friedan and the Feminine Mystique,” in Faces of Feminism: An Activist’s Reflections on the Women’s Movement (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997), 58–59.

23. L. G. Sexton, Mercy Street, 112.

24. Anne Sexton, “Housewife,” in Sexton, Complete Poems, 77.

25. On Sexton and feminism, see Jane McCabe, “ ‘A Woman Who Writes’: A Feminist Approach to the Early Poetry of Anne Sexton,” in McClatchy, The Artist and Her Critics, 216–17; Diana Hume George, Oedipus Anne: The Poetry of Anne Sexton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). Brogan, “Review,” in McClatchy, The Artist and Her Critics, 126.

26. Robert Boyers, “Live or Die: The Achievement of Anne Sexton,” in McClatchy, The Artist and Her Critics, 207. For a view of Sexton as preening victim, see Geoffrey Thurley, The American Moment: American Poetry in the Mid-Century (New York: St. Martin’s, 1978), 90.

27. On the affairs and various forms of family turmoil, see Middlebrook, Sexton, 245–67; L. G. Sexton, Mercy Street, 83–92.

28. Sexton to Tillie Olsen, circa New Year’s Day, 1966, in Sexton, Self-Portrait, 278.

29. Anne Sexton, “The Addict,” in Sexton, Complete Poems, 165–66. On her drug and alcohol consumption, see Middlebrook, Sexton, 139–40; 210–11.

30. L. G. Sexton note, in Sexton, Self-Portrait, 246–47.

31. Anne Sexton, “Live,” in Sexton, Complete Poems, 167–70.

32. Sexton to Claire S. Degener (29 March 1966), in Sexton, Self-Portrait, 286. On Sexton and performance anxiety see “The Freak Show,” in Sexton, No Evil Star, 33–38.

33. Middlebrook, Sexton, 247–48.

34. Anne Sexton, “Wanting to Die,” in Sexton, Complete Poems, 142–43. Parts of the film are available online: https://vimeo.com/31859432.

35. Dickey, “Dialogues with Themselves,” New York Times (28 April 1963), 294. Dickey, “Review of To Bedlam,” in McClatchy, The Artist and Her Critics, 118.

36. Middlebrook, Sexton, 250.

37. Sexton to James Dickey (24 March 1966), in Sexton, Self-Portrait, 282–83.

38. Sexton, “Comment on ‘Some Foreign Letters,’ ” and “The Freak Show,” in Sexton, No Evil Star, 17, 33–34.

39. L. G. Sexton, Mercy Street, 125–26.

40. Sexton to Legler (28 April 1966, 2 May 1966), in Sexton, Self-Portrait, 288–92.

41. Middlebrook, Sexton, 255–57.

42. Anne Sexton, “For My Lover Returning to His Wife,” in Sexton, Complete Poems, 188.

43. Sexton to Philip Legler (2 May 1966), in Sexton, Self-Portrait, 292.

44. Sexton to Lois Ames (2 August 1966), in Sexton, Self-Portrait, 298.

45. Sexton to Lois Ames (2 August 1966), in Sexton, Self-Portrait, 297, 298.

46. Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (New York: Random House, 1965), 302.

47. Alfred Friendly Jr., “Richard Speck’s Chicago,” New York Times, 18 July 1966, 16; Austin C. Wehrwein, “8 Student Nurses Slain in Chicago Dormitory,” New York Times, 15 July 1966, 1, 14.

48. Albin Krebs, “The Texas Killer: Former Florida Neighbors Recall a Nice Boy Who Liked Guns,” New York Times, 2 August 1966, 15; “Nation: The Madman in the Tower,” Time, 12 August 1966.

49. “Crime: Slaughter in the College of Beauty,” Time, 18 November 1966; Mara Bovsun, “Beauty Salon Massacre,” New York Daily News, 25 March 2008, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/beauty-salon-massacre-article-1.273663.

50. Sexton to Lois Ames (2 August 1966), in Sexton, Self-Portrait, 298.

51. Sexton to Lois Ames (7 September 1966), in Sexton, Self-Portrait, 299.

52. Sexton to Rise and Steven Axelrod (10 September 1974), in Sexton, Self-Portrait, 421.

53. Anne Sexton, “Live,” in Sexton, Collected Poems, 170.

54. L. G. Sexton, Half in Love, 26.

Chapter 16

1. Alexandra Styron, Reading My Father: A Memoir (New York: Scribner, 2011, 154.

2. James L. W. West III, William Styron: A Life (New York: Random House, 2008), 276; West, “A Bibliographer’s Interview with William Styron,” in Conversations with William Styron, ed. James L. W. West III (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 204–5.

3. C. Vann Woodward and R. W. B. Lewis, “The Confessions of William Styron,” in West, Conversations, 87.

4. Douglas Barzelay and Robert Sussman, “William Styron on The Confessions of Nat Turner,” in West, Conversations, 103.

5. Robert Canzoneri and Page Stegner, “An Interview with William Styron,” in West, Conversations, 67.

6. On connections between Confessions and Styron’s earlier work, see Marc L. Ratner, “Styron’s Rebel,” American Quarterly 21 (Autumn 1969): 595–608.

7. William Styron, “A Voice from the South” (1989), in Styron, This Quiet Dust, and Other Writings (New York: Vintage, 1993), 57–58.

8. Styron to Elizabeth McKee (14 May 1952), in Selected Letters of William Styron, ed. Rose Styron (New York: Random House, 2012), 127.

9. Styron to William Styron Sr. (20 May 1952), in Styron, Letters, 130.

10. Styron to William Styron Sr. (1 May 1952), in Styron, Letters, 123; in “This Quiet Dust” (1965) he recalled first hearing about the rebellion in the 1930. Styron, Quiet Dust, 12.

11. Styron to Robert Loomis (27 May 1952), in Styron, Letters, 134.

12. Styron to William Styron Sr. (3 March 1953), in Styron, Letters, 168–69.

13. Styron to Norman Mailer (1 June 1953); Styron to Mac Hyman (15 August 1953); Styron to Maxwell Geismer (24 March 1953), in Styron, Letters, 184, 186, 175.

14. Styron to Norman Mailer (1 June 1953), in Styron, Letters, 184.

15. Canzoneri and Stegner, “An Interview,” 70–73.

16. Styron to Norman Mailer (17 March 1958), and notes, in Styron, Letters, 250–51.

17. Mailer, Advertisements for Myself (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959), 465.

18. Styron to James and Gloria Jones (24 March 1959), in Styron, Letters, 263.

19. Styron to James Jones (7 December 1959, 15 September 1959), in Styron, Letters, 274, 269.

20. Styron to Robert Loomis (3 April 1962), in Styron, Letters, 324.

21. The reference to “columbine” in the novel by Nat serves as a device to recall his youth; it is akin to Hearst’s “Rosebud,” the name of a sled that he had as a child. Styron had originally thought of “dogwood” as the connection but decided it was too similar to “Rosebud.” Ben Forkner and Gilbert Schricke, “An Interview with William Styron,” and Michael West, “An Interview with William Styron,” in West, Conversations, 196, 225.

22. On its composition see West, A Life, 335–71.

23. Styron to Robert Penn Warren (21 February 1967); Styron to William Blackburn (29 November 1967), in Styron, Letters, 412, 429–30.

24. Raymond A. Sokolov, “Into the Mind of Nat Turner,” Newsweek, 16 October 1967, 69.

25. Philip Rahv, “Through the Midst of Jerusalem,” New York Review of Books, 26 October 1967; Wilfred Sheed, “The Slave Who Became a Man,” New York Times Book Review, 8 October 1967, 1–2; Eliot Fremont-Smith, “A Sword is Sharpened,” New York Times, 3 October 1967, 45. Fremont-Smith reconsidered the book more critically another time, in two articles in, New York Times (1 August 1968, 29; 4 October 1967).

26. Nat Turner, “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” in The Nat Turner Rebellion: The Historical Event and Modern Controversy, ed. John B. Duff and Peter M. Mitchell (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 22.

27. On the rebellion see Stephen B. Oates, The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion (New York: Harper & Row, 1975); the essays in Kenneth S. Greenberg, ed., Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); Scot French, The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 2004).

28. James Baldwin, “Interview with Studs Terkel” (1961), in Conversations with James Baldwin, ed. Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1989), 12, 21.

29. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Dial, 1963), 21.

30. Baldwin, Fire Next Time, 112.

31. Baldwin, Fire Next Time, 119–20.

32. William Styron, Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays (New York: Random House, 2008), 96, 99, 101–2; Sokolov, “Into the Mind,” 67. On Baldwin as model for Nat see Charles Joyner, “Styron’s Choice: A Meditation on History, Literature, and Moral Imperatives,” in Greenberg, Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion, 204.

33. William Styron, “Introduction,” Styron, Quiet Dust, 4.

34. Sokolov, “Into the Mind,” 67; Stanley Kauffmann, “Styron’s Unwritten Novel,” Hudson Review 20 (Winter 1967–1968): 675–80.

35. Canzoneri and Stegner, “An Interview,” 73, 88.

36. Styron to Louis D. Rubin (8 July 1974), in Styron, Letters, 511.

37. John Henrik Clarke, ed., William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (Boston: Beacon, 1968), 4–5.

38. His pal the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. had wondered about this omission, although he otherwise supported Styron’s history with enthusiasm against his critics. Schlesinger to Styron (27 July 1967), in The Letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., ed. Andrew Schlesinger and Stephen Schlesinger (New York: Random House, 2013), 337.

39. Canzoneri and Stegner, “An Interview,” 75.

40. Canzoneri and Stegner, “An Interview,” 77.

41. Styron to William Blackburn (19 April 1968), in Styron, Letters, 435. Styron was, at least in casual conversation and letters, capable of offhand racist remarks. See Styron to Blackburn (14 November 1968), in Styron, Letters, 444–45.

42. Styron to Donald Gallagher (10 February 1971), in Styron, Letters, 457.

43. Barzelay and Sussman, “William Styron on The Confessions,” and Rust Hills, “Conversation: Arthur Miller and William Styron,” in West, Conversations, 107, 173.

44. Styron to Hope Leresche (18 April 1968), in Styron, Letters, 434.

45. Joyce Haber, “A Frank Discussion of ‘Nat Turner,’ ” Los Angeles Times, 29 May 1968, C7.

46. Ralph Ellison, William Styron, Robert Penn Warren, and C. Vann Woodward, “A Discussion on the Uses of History on Fiction,” Southern Literary Journal 1, no. 2 (Spring 1969): 57–90.

47. Ellison et al., “Uses of History,” 62, 73, 60–61, 58–59, 75.

48. Ellison et al., “Uses of History,” 78–79; Donald W. Markos, “Margaret Whitehead in The Confessions of Nat Turner,” Studies in the Novel 4 (Spring 1972): 52–59.

49. Ellison et al., “Uses of History,” 79–80; West, A Life, 392.

50. Ellison et al., “Uses of History,” 80, 81–83.

51. On Styron’s reading of the historical literature on slavery see Styron, Dust, 35–38; West, Conversations, 112. He also had the support of many leading historians. See, in particular, Eugene Genovese, “The Nat Turner Case,” New York Review of Books, 12 September 1968, 34–37. Subsequent issues found the debate still stirring. On the debate and its varied meanings see Okon E. Uya, “Race, Ideology and Scholarship in the United States: William Styron’s Nat Turner and its Critics,” American Quarterly 15 (Winter 1976): 63–81; Ernest P. Williams, “William Styron and His Ten Black Critics,” Phylon 37, no. 2 (1976): 189–95; Herbert Shapiro, “The Confessions of Nat Turner: William Styron and his Critics,” Negro American Literature Forum 9 (Winter 1975): 99–104; D. Michael Sink, “A Response to Critics: The Confessions of Nat Turner,” Clearing House 48 (October 1973): 125–26.

52. Styron to Donald Harrington (15 January 1964), Letters, 157; Quiet Dust, 15.

53. Woodward and Lewis, “Confessions of William Styron,” 91.

54. Canzoneri and Stegner, “An Interview,” 78.

55. William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner: A Novel (New York: Random House, 1967), 27.

56. A vexing problem in many slave narratives.

57. Styron, Confessions, 39.

58. Styron, Confessions, 83.

59. Styron, Confessions, 88.

60. Styron to Schlesinger (29 July 1967), in Styron, Letters, 427.

61. Styron to William Styron Sr., (24 February 1961), in Styron, Letters, 309.

62. Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (New York: Random House, 1965).

63. Jack Behar, “History and Fiction,” Novel 3 (Spring 1970): 260–65. He focused on Styron’s problems with language.

64. Barzelay and Sussman, “William Styron on The Confessions,” 94.

65. Woodward and Lewis, “Confessions of William Styron,” 87.

66. William Styron, “Hell Reconsidered” (1968), in Styron, Quiet Dust, 107.

67. William Styron, “Introduction,” in Styron, Quiet Dust, 7.

68. Forkner and Schricke, “Interview with William Styron,” 193.

69. George Core, “The Confessions of Nat Turner and The Burden of the Past,” Southern Literary Journal 2 (Spring 1970): 117–34.

70. William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (New York: Random House, 1990), 21.

71. Canzoneri and Stegner, “An Interview,” 71.

72. Styron, Confessions, 77.

73. Richard Gilman, “Nat Turner Revisited” (1968), in Duff and Mitchell, Nat Turner Rebellion, 234–35.

74. Canzoneri and Stegner, “An Interview,” 69–71.

75. George Plimpton, “William Styron: A Shared Ordeal,” New York Times, 8 October 1967, BR2; Styron, Confessions, 72–73.

76. Alden Whitman, “William Styron Examines the Negro Upheaval,” New York Times, 5 August 1957, 13.

77. William E. Akin, “Toward an Impressionistic History: Pitfalls and Possibilities in William Styron’s Meditation on History,” American Quarterly 21 (Winter 1969): 805–12.

78. Norman O. Brown, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (New York: Vintage, 1959), 175.

79. Hayden White, “The Burden of History,” History and Theory 5, no. 2 (1966): 112, 128–29.

80. Bret McCabe, “Structuralism’s Samson,” Johns Hopkins Magazine, Fall 2012, available online at http://hub.jhu.edu/magazine/2012/fall/structuralisms-samson.

81. Richard Macksey, “Anniversary Reflections,” in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), xviii.

82. Styron to Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan (5 July 1979), in Styron, Letters, 536.

Chapter 17

1. Gore Vidal, “Interview,” Playboy, June 1969, 93; Robert Hofler, Sexplosion: From Andy Warhol to A Clockwork Orange—How a Generation of Pop Rebels Broke All the Taboos (New York: It Books, 2014), 19.

2. Fremont-Smith, “Like Fay Wray if the Light is Right,” New York Times, 3 February 1968, 27.

3. Gore Vidal, Myra Breckinridge (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), 3. On the book see Fred Kaplan, Gore Vidal: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1999), 577–602; Bernard F. Dick, The Apostate Angel: A Critical Study of Gore Vidal (New York: Random House, 1974);141–70; Robert F. Kiernan, Gore Vidal (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982), 94–109. For his drafts, see series I, compositions, folders 65–71, Gore Vidal Papers, Harvard University. A guide to the papers is available online at http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/deepLink?_collection=oasis&uniqueId=hou01943. On Vidal’s upsetting expectations see Gerald Clarke, “The Art of Fiction L: Gore Vidal” (1974), in Conversations with Gore Vidal, ed. Richard Peabody and Lucinda Ebersole (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), 42.

4. Andrew Sarris, Confessions of a Cultist: On the Cinema, 1955/1969 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), 274.

5. Gore Vidal, “Interview with Hollis Alpert and Janos Kadar” (1977), in Peabody and Ebersole, Conversations, 80.

6. Sarris, Confessions, 284. See also Paul Monaco, History of the American Cinema: The Sixties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 62.

7. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 278, 281, 283, 287, 292. On how camp was both oppositional and contained see Andrew Ross, “Uses of Camp,” in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 169. Helpful on tragedy and parody in Myra are Dick, Apostate Angel, 159–60; Purvis E. Boyette, “Myra Breckinridge and Imitative Form,” Modern Fiction Studies 17 (Summer 1971): 229–38.

8. George Melly, Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts (London: Oxford University Press, 1989), 192.

9. Hilton Kramer, “Look! All Over! It’s Esthetic … It’s Business … It’s Supersuccess!,” New York Times, 29 March 1966, 33; Jack Gould, “Too Good to Be Camp,” New York Times, 23 January 1966, 109. See also Andy Medhurst, “Batman, Deviance and Camp,” in The Many Lives of Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media (London: Routledge, 1991), 149–63.

10. Gore Vidal, “Miss Sontag’s New Novel” (1967), in United States: Essays, 1952–1992 (New York: Random House, 1993), 377. On the Sontag-Vidal connection see Dennis Altman, Gore Vidal’s America (London: Polity, 2005), 131.

11. Gore Vidal, “French Letters: Theories of the New Novel,” in Vidal, United States, 89–110; Susan Sontag, “Nathalie Sarraute and the Novel,” in Sontag, Against Interpretation, 100–11. On Vidal and the New Novelists, see Dick, Apostate Angel, 151–53.

12. Susan Sontag, “Thirty Years Later … ” (1995), in Where the Stress Falls (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), 268–73.

13. Vidal, “French Letters,” 91. Jay Parini remembers conversations with Vidal about Sontag’s work. Parini, personal communication, 24 March 2014.

14. Vidal, Myra, 4.

15. Lewis Nichols, “Underground,” New York Times, 28 January 1968, BR32.

16. Vidal, Myra, 5.

17. Vidal, Myra, 26, 148. Parker Tyler was, in fact, an influential gay historian of film.

18. Vidal, Myra, 30.

19. Vidal, Myra, 234, 161, 177.

20. Vidal, Myra, 182, 184.

21. Vidal, Myra, 259–60.

22. Vidal, Myra, 263.

23. John Updike, Couples: A Novel (New York: Random House, 1996), 63, 111.

24. David Allyn, Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution; An Unfettered History (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000), 55, 66.

25. Ed Sanders, Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side (New York: Da Capo, 2011), 180.

26. Philip Roth, “Whacking Off (A Story),” Partisan Review 34 (Summer 1967): 399.

27. Quoted in John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 307.

28. Quoted in Douglas Martin, “Robert H. Rimmer Obituary,” New York Times, 11 August 2001, A13.

29. Rex Reed, “Breakthrough by ‘The Boys in the Band,’ ” New York Times, 12 May 1968, D1.

30. Allyn, Make Love, 106. On radical feminists in relation to sexual liberation see Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), esp. 139–201.

31. Quoted in Allyn, Make Love, 103.

32. Vidal, “Interview,” 92.

33. Charles Russ, “Interview with Gore Vidal” (1998), in Peabody and Ebersole, Conversations, 98

34. Kaplan, Biography, 579.

35. Gore Vidal, “Pornography” (1966), in Gore Vidal: Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings, ed. Donald Weise (San Francisco, Cleis, 1999), 39.

36. Gore Vidal, “Women’s Liberation and Its Discontents” (1971), in Vidal, United States, 585.

37. Gore Vidal, Palimpsest: A Memoir (New York: Penguin, 1995), 102; Vidal, “Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self” (1976), in Vidal, United States, 1139–40. For Vidal’s views on homosexual activity see his “Doc Reuben” (1970), in Vidal, Sexually Speaking, 51–56.

38. Things get complicated, however, in the sequel, Myron: A Novel (New York: Random House, 1974).

39. Gore Vidal, “The Fag Rag Interview” (1974), in Peabody and Ebersole, Conversations, 18.

40. Gore Vidal, Snapshots in History’s Glare (New York: Abrams, 2009), 77.

41. On Vidal and homosexuality, in politics and literature, see Altman, Gore Vidal’s America, 127–54.

42. Larry Kramer, “The Sadness of Gore Vidal” (1992), in Vidal, Sexually Speaking, 254.

43. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 33ff.

44. Vidal, Palimpsest, 95.

45. Kaplan, Biography, 369; Gore Vidal, Two Sisters: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 213. There is a story, lurid and perhaps apocryphal, that Kerouac wanted revenge for this outrage, so he had his pal Neal Cassady pick up Vidal, take him to the Chelsea Hotel, and then rape him. “Vidal kicked and screamed,” according to Cassady’s account, which goes in great detail. For this alleged event see Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince, Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (New York: BloodMoon, 2014), 301–2.

46. Vidal, Sexually Speaking, 97. For a smart and funny analysis of these themes, see Catharine R. Stimpson, “My O My O Myra,” in Gore Vidal: Writer against the Grain, ed. Jay Parini (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 191–93.

47. Jon Wiener, “The Scholar Squirrels and the National Security Scare: An Interview with Gore Vidal” (1988), in Peabody and Ebersole, Conversations, 112; Robert J. Stanton and Gore Vidal, eds., Views from a Window: Conversations with Gore Vidal (Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1980), 236; Vidal, Sexually Speaking, 228.

48. Stanton and Vidal, Views from a Window, 147; “The Gay Sunshine Interview” (1974), in Vidal, Sexually Speaking, 225–26.

49. On the events of 1968, see Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World (New York: Random House, 2005); Cronkite quote on 61. See also Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (New York: Hill & Wang, 1994); Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). On the period from an international perspective, see Gerard J. DeGroot, The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Arthur Marwick, The Sixties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Paul Berman, A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).

50. Kurlansky, 1968, 115; Anderson, The Movement, 192.

51. Valerie Solanas, The SCUM Manifesto, available online at http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/rants/scum.html; Jennifer Pan, “Trasher Feminism: Valerie Solanas and Her Enemies,” Dissent (Spring 2014): 83–86.

52. Kurlansky, 1968, 197.

53. Kurlansky, 1968, 207.

54. Susan Sontag, “Trip to Hanoi” (2008), and “What’s Happening in America” (1966), in Styles of Radical Will (New York: Picador, 2002), 237, 203.

55. Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968; repr., New York: New York Review Books, 2008), 169.

56. On Chicago see David Farber, Chicago ’68 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

57. Vidal, Snapshots, 166; Kaplan, Biography, 594.

58. Jack Gould, “TV: Politics Fails to Lure Viewers from Adventure,” New York Times, 7 August 1968, 87.

59. On the exchange see Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America (New York: Twelve, 2012), 122–27; William F. Buckley Jr., “On Experiencing Gore Vidal,” Esquire, August, 1969; Vidal, “A Distasteful Encounter with William F. Buckley, Jr.,” Esquire, September 1969. See also “Feuds: Wasted Talent,” Time, 22 August 1969. The courts eventually threw out Vidal’s suit. Buckley dropped the suit against Vidal but collected over $100,000 in damages from the magazine. “Buckley Drops Vidal Suit, Settles with Esquire,” New York Times, 26 September, 1972, 40.

Chapter 18

1. “David Frost Interviews LeRoi Jones,” in Amiri Baraka, Conversations with Amiri Baraka, ed. Charlie Reilly (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994), 62, 66, 69.

2. Stewart Smith and Peter Thorn, “An Interview with LeRoi Jones” (1966), in Baraka, Conversations, 13. In 1967 Jones began using the name Amiri Baraka. He did so inconsistently, well into 1969. When speaking of him and his work prior to 1967, I will employ LeRoi Jones, switching to Amiri Baraka for later works.

3. Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (New York: Freundlich, 1984), 194.

4. LeRoi Jones, “To Survive ‘The Reign of the Beasts,’ ” New York Times, 16 November 1969, D1, 2. In a review, Jack Richardson considered works by Baraka, Harold Cruse, Eldridge Cleaver, and James Baldwin—all pointing toward a “black sensibility.” He complained, however, “Exactly what that sensibility is, of course, no one seems to know.” See Richardson, “The Black Arts,” New York Review of Books, 19 December 1968, available online at http://www.nyb.com/articles/archives/1968/dec/19/the-black-arts-2. Similar demands for no interaction with whites had happened before. See Peter Greenberg, “LeRoi Jones Asks Black Privileges for WSA Talk,” University of Wisconsin Cardinal, 7 February 1969, 1.

5. Clive Barnes, “The Theater: New LeRoi Jones Play,” New York Times, 22 November 1969, 46. On the play see Mike Sell, Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 223, 248–50.

6. A. S. Doc Young, “Letter to the Editor,” New York Times, 30 November 1969, 38; Taylor Mead, “Letter to the Editor,” New York Times, 14 December 1969, D15.

7. Gerald Weales, “What Were the Blacks Doing in the Balcony: The Day LeRoi Jones Spoke on Penn Campus,” New York Times, 4 May 1969, SM 38–41, 44, 48, 52–56.

8. Amiri Baraka, Jello (Chicago: Third World, 1970), 8.

9. Martin Duberman claimed that Jones was after “private catharsis” more than serious communication. Duberman, “James Meredith and LeRoi Jones” (1966), in The Uncompleted Past (New York: Random House, 1969), 135. Ross Posnock usefully highlights the ambivalence and ambiguity of Jones and other black artists in white America. Posnock, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 245. The poem is “Cold Term,” in Jones, “Black Art,” in Black Magic: Collected Poetry, 1961–1967 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), 91.

10. Pinckney, “The Changes of Amiri Baraka,” New York Times, 16 December 1979, BR3.

11. See two excellent works, Werner Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 185, and Jerry Gafio Watts, Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual (New York: New York University Press, 2001); see also Kimberly W. Benston, Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976). Also helpful is Lloyd W. Brown, Amiri Baraka (Boston: Twayne, 1980). On his artistic development see William J. Harris, The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), and Theodore R. Hudson, From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka: The Literary Works (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1973).

12. On these years see Hettie Jones, How I Became Hettie Jones (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1990); Diane di Prima, Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years (New York: Viking, 2001).

13. LeRoi Jones, “Black Dada Nihilismus,” in The Dead Lecturer (New York: Grove, 1964), 61–64; H. Jones, How I Became, 237.

14. Jones, “LeRoi Jones Talking,” in Home: Social Essays (New York: William Morrow, 1965), 188.

15. William Taubman, “The Theater: ‘Dutchman,’ ” New York Times, 25 March 1964, 46.

16. LeRoi Jones, The Slave, in Dutchman and The Slave: Two Plays (New York: Morrow, 1964), 55, 88

17. Jones, Dead Lecturer, 15.

18. Stanley Kauffmann, “LeRoi Jones and the Tradition of the Fake,” Dissent 12, no. 2 (Spring 1965): 207–12.

19. Baraka, Autobiography, 168; LeRoi Jones, Blues People (New York: William Morrow, 1963), 235.

20. For a smart critique of Jones’s work in Harlem, from a nationalist perspective, see Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow, 1967), 362–68.

21. LeRoi Jones, “state/meant,” in Home: Social Essays (New York: William Morrow, 1965), 251–52.

22. Amiri Baraka, Raise, Race, Rays, Raze: Essays since 1965 (New York: Random House, 1971), 33, 98.

23. Jones/Baraka, Autobiography, 259–60.

24. Hoyt W. Fuller, “Towards a Black Aesthetic,” in Black Expression, comp. Addison Gayle Jr. (New York: Weybright & Talley, [1969]), 263.

25. Jones/Baraka, Autobiography, 261–62. See also Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ‘til The Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 183–88.

26. Jones/Baraka, Autobiography, 266.

27. Walter H. Waggoner, “LeRoi Jones Jailed in Manacles after Outburst in Jersey Court,” New York Times, 25 October 1967, 30.

28. LeRoi Jones, “Black People!,” in Jones, Black Magic, 225.

29. Walter H. Waggoner, “LeRoi Jones Guilty in Weapons Case,” New York Times, 7 November 1967, 24; “LeRoi Jones Wins Retrial in Jersey,” New York Times, 24 December 1968, 24; and “Court in Jersey Clears LeRoi Jones,” New York Times, 17 January 1970, 16. Material on the trial is in Hudson, From LeRoi Jones, 28–31. Jones had been arrested for assault on Shepard Sherbell, the editor of a literary magazine. The charge was dismissed in 1967. See “Assault Charge Dismissed against Negro Playwright,” New York Times, 20 January 1967, 72. He would return to court in 1969. See “LeRoi Jones Is Accused of Receiving Stolen Goods,” New York Times, 18 March 1969, 49.

30. D. B. Melhem, “Revolution: The Constancy of Change” in Baraka, Conversations, 194.

31. Alexander Downs, Cornell ’69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 353.

32. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (Toronto: Bantam, 1987), 392–94.

33. Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Dutton, 1993), 193, 195.

34. For a copy of the manifesto, see the Redstockings website, http://www.redstockings.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=76&Itemid=59. On the Redstockings, see Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 151–54.

35. Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, “A Poem Some People Will Have to Understand,” in Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (New York: William Morrow, 1979), 55.

36. James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (New York: Seabury, 1969), 8.

37. Peter Kihiss, “Negro Attitudes Found Hardening,” New York Times, 26 October 1969, 53.

38. Clive Barnes, “Black Theater: Of Politics and Passion,” New York Times, 22 September 1969, 36.

39. See Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Revolution (New York: Viking, 2011).

40. Sollors, Amiri Baraka, 206–10.

41. Amiri Baraka, The Death of Malcolm X, in New Plays from the Black Theatre, ed. Ed Bullins (New York: Bantam, 1969), 2–20.

42. Amiri Baraka, “The Black Arts Movement,” in The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, ed. William J. Harris (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1999), 502.

43. Stephen Henderson, Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References (New York: William Morrow, 1973), 7, 21, 30ff.

44. Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement” (1968), in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle Jr. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 273; James Edward Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); David Lionel Smith, “The Black Arts Movement and Its Critics,” American Literary History 3 (Spring 1991): 93–110. Also, for a look back on the movement and its idealism, see Houston A. Baker Jr., “The Black Spokesman as Critic: Reflections on the Black Aesthetic,” in The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 133.

45. Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal, eds., Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (1969; repr., Baltimore: Black Classic, 2007), xxiii.

46. Amiri Baraka, “An Explanation of the Work,” in Baraka, Black Magic, n.p.

47. Maulana Karenga, The Quotable Karenga, ed. Clyde Halisi (Los Angeles: US Org., 1967), 9.

48. On Karenga see the excellent Scot Brown, Fighting for US: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 12 and passim. See also Komzoi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), esp. 159ff. On Baraka and Karenga, see Joseph, Waiting, 216–19; Henry C. Lacey, To Raise, Destroy, and Create: The Poetry Drama, and Fiction of Imamu Amiri Baraka (Troy, NY: Whitson, 1981), 126–27. For Baraka’s take, see Baraka, Autobiography, 252ff.

49. Amiri Baraka, “A Black Value System,” The Black Scholar 1 (November 1969): 58.

50. Amiri Baraka and Fundi (Billy Abernathy), In Our Terribleness: (Some Elements and Meaning in Black Style) (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970). Unfortunately, the book is unpaginated. For a brief discussion of Fundi see Margo Natalie Crawford, “Black Light and the Wall of Respect: The Chicago Black Arts Movement,” in New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 24. In his otherwise superlative work on Jones/Baraka, Werner Sollors neglects to mention In Our Terribleness. More attention is paid to the work in Clyde Taylor, “Baraka as Poet,” in Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): A Collection of Critical Essays ed. Kimberly W. Benston (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 117–18. Critical of Baraka for his sentimentalism and romanticism of black life is Jennifer Jordan, “Cultural Nationalism in the 1960s: Politics and Poetry,” in Race, Politics, and Poetry: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960s, ed. Adolph Reed Jr. (Westport, CT.: Greenwood, 1986), 44–45.

51. Amiri Baraka, “Talk with Mel Watkins” (1971), in Baraka, Conversations, 91. Baraka reportedly tried to get his publisher to pay for a book launch party to be catered by his sister. Bobbs-Merrill refused. Hudson, From LeRoi Jones, 141–42.

52. Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes, The Sweet Flypaper of Life (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967).

53. Harris, Poetry and Poetics, 23. Clyde Taylor, “Baraka,” in Benston, Imamu Amiri Baraka, 117. In Our Terribleness did not receive much attention in the mainstream press, but it got a boffo review by Ron Welburn, “In Our Terribleness,” New York Times Book Review, 14 February 1971, 10, 12.

54. For popular radio culture in his work, see LeRoi Jones, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (New York: Totem, 1961), 10–14.

55. Charlie Reilly, “An Interview with Amiri Baraka” (1991), in Baraka, Conversations, 243.

Chapter 19

1. Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus (Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1972), 3. Only the introduction is paginated. Quote for title comes from a conversation between Arbus and the feminist Susan Brownmiller; see Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 239.

2. Jacob Deschin, “People Seen as Curiosity,” New York Times, 5 March 1967, 129.

3. Bosworth, Arbus, 247–49.

4. Quoted in Leo Rubinfein, “Where Diane Arbus Went,” Art in America 9 (October 2005): 67.

5. For biographical information on Arbus, see selections from Arbus’s writings in Diane Arbus, Revelations (New York: Random House, 2003); see 183–89 for the year 1967.

6. Arbus, Revelations, 198–202. This book is an immense compilation of images, parts of letters, journal entries, and more.

7. Arbus, Revelations, 206, 207.

8. Arbus, Revelations, 206, 218.

9. Arbus, Revelations, 214.

10. Gregory Gibson, Hubert’s Freaks: The Rare-Book Dealer, The Times Square Talker, and the Lost Photos of Diane Arbus (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2008), esp. 53ff. On freaks, in myth and reality, see Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978). Fiedler has little to offer on Arbus.

11. Arthur Lubow, “The Woman and the Giant (No Fable),” New York Times, 13 April 2014, AL, 24.

12. Amy Waldman, “Revisiting a Life,” New York Times, 23 September 1999, E5.

13. Arbus, Revelations, 153.

14. See her comments in Elisabeth Sussman and Doon Arbus, Diane Arbus: A Chronology, 1927–1971 (New York: Aperture, 2011), 68.

15. Arbus, Revelations, 209. On the image, see Carol Armstrong, “Biology, Destiny, Photography: Difference According to Diane Arbus,” October 66 (Fall 1993): 43.

16. A. D. Coleman, “Diana Arbus: Her Portraits Are Self-Portraits,” New York Times, 5 November 1972, D33.

17. Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus, 2.

18. Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus, 9–10. Janet Malcolm considered her “an old-fashioned photographer” because she took portraits. Malcolm, “Diana and Nikon,” New Yorker, 26 April 1976, 117. For more on her photographic style, see Hilton Kramer, “Arbus Photos, at Venice, Show Power,” New York Times, 17 June 1972, 25.

19. Arbus, Revelations, 66; Bosworth, Arbus, 193.

20. Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus, 1.

21. Lubow, “The Woman,” 24; Christoph Ribbat, “Queer and Straight Photography,” Amerikastudien 46, no. 1 (2001): 32; Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2011), 142. On her desire to disrupt expectations, see Frederick Gross, Diane Arbus’s 1960s: Auguries of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 105.

22. Bosworth, Arbus, 291.

23. Bosworth, Arbus, 178–79. On the fantasy aspects of Arbus’s work, see Lisa A. Baird, “Susan Sontag and Diane Arbus: The Siamese Twins of Photographic Art,” Women’s Studies 37 (2008): 982.

24. Arbus, Revelations, 180.

25. Bosworth, Arbus, 224.

26. William Todd Schultz, An Emergency in Slow Motion (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 76.

27. Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel, eds., Diane Arbus: Magazine Work (Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1984), 31.

28. Mailer quoted in Bosworth, Arbus, 227.

29. Arbus and Israel, Magazine Work, 58–61; Bosworth, Arbus, 197.

30. Norman Mailer, The Prisoner of Sex (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 49–51. The key parts of the book had appeared earlier in an article in Harper’s Magazine. Mailer’s animus was directed at criticisms of him and other male writers, such as Henry Miller, in Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970). One of her cutting insights was that Mailer made the male protagonist’s penis a character in his novels.

31. Israel Shenker, “Norman Mailer vs. Women’s Lib,” New York Times, 1 May 1971, 19.

32. According to writer Dotson Rader, Greer had been “tracking Norman like a bounty hunter,” eager to flee with him to her room at the Chelsea Hotel to get it on. That meeting of the minds and bodies, alas, fizzled out during an argument in the cab. See J. Michael Lennon, Norman Mailer: A Double Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 441–43. For a milder view of the amity between Mailer and Greer, see Mary V. Dearborn, Mailer: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 295.

33. Schultz, Emergency, 4.

34. Sylvia Plachy, “Get the Picture?” Village Voice, 24 September 1985, 54.

35. Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding (New York: Mariner, 2004), 20.

36. Gross, Arbus’s 1960s, 130, 46.

37. Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus, n.p.

38. Arbus, Revelations, 98.

39. Arbus, Revelations, 243.

40. Arbus, Revelations, 212. Another shot shows the circus performer swallowing a sword, which looks like a cross.

41. Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus, n.p.

42. Arbus, Revelations, 66.

43. Arbus, Revelations, 190, 196, 200.

44. Arbus, Revelations, 191.

45. Arbus, Revelations, 196–97, 201.

46. Arbus, Revelations, 202.

47. Arbus, Revelations, 203.

48. Schultz, Emergency, 178; Louis A. Sass, “ ‘Hyped on Clarity’: Diane Arbus and the Postmodern Condition,” Raritan 25 (Summer 2005): 35–36. For a different view, see Rubinfein, “Where Diane Arbus Went,” 66–67.

49. Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus, 15.

50. Arbus, Revelations, 204.

51. Sussman and Arbus, Chronology, 85.

52. The images discussed are bundled at the end of the unpaginated Aperture volume. For a less positive view of the images, see Robert Bogdan, Picturing Disability: Beggar, Freak, Citizen, and Other Photographic Rhetoric (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012), 132–35. On Arbus and masks see Geoff Dyer, The Ongoing Moment (New York: Pantheon, 2005), 42.

53. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977), 43, 44. Subsequent citations of this work appear as page references in the text. See also Sass, “Hyped on Clarity,” 10. Arbus’s work, according to writer and photographer Eudora Welty, “totally violates human privacy, and by intention.” See Dyer, Ongoing Moment, 42. On the Sontag and Arbus dispute see Baird, “Susan Sontag and Diane Arbus,” 971–86.

54. Rubinfein, “Where Diane Arbus Went,” asserts that Sontag was upset less by the freakishness of Arbus’s subjects than by their “fatedness,” their lack of options. 75.

55. Arbus was, unsurprisingly, a fan of the 1932 cult film Freaks directed by Tod Browning popular during the late 1960s and early 1970s,.

56. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), 104, 114, 117.

57. Hilton Kramer, “125 Photos by Arbus on Display,” New York Times, 8 November 1972, 52.

Chapter 20

1. Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream,” Rolling Stone, 11 November 1971, 38, 48.

2. Roger Fong to Editor, Rolling Stone, 9 December 1971, 3.

3. Ada Louise Huxtable, “Celebrating ‘Dumb, Ordinary’ Architecture,” New York Times, 1 October 1971, 43.

4. Tom Wolfe, “Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can’t Hear You! Too Noisy) Las Vegas!!!!,” in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965), 3–5.

5. Wolfe, “Las Vegas,” 7, 14; Denise Scott Brown, “On Pop Art, Permissiveness and Planning,” in Having Words (London: AA, 2010), 56.

6. Wolfe, “Las Vegas,” 12.

7. Wolfe, “Las Vegas,” 8, 10.

8. On Vegas, see Hal Rothman, Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the Twenty-First Century (New York: Routledge, 2002), which chronicles the fantasy aspects of the city. See also Marc Cooper, The Last Honest Place in America: Paradise and Perdition in the New Las Vegas (New York: Nation Books, 2004). Novelists, too, have been drawn to Vegas. For a contemporary of Thompson’s see John Gregory Dunne, Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season (New York: Random House, 1974), and the great work by his wife, Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays: A Novel (1970; repr., New York: Noonday, 1991).

9. On Thompson’s influences see William Stephenson, Gonzo Republic: Hunter S. Thompson’s America (London: Continuum, 2012); on Thompson as both “modest and self-depreciating at the same time he was being a mad-dog journalist,” see William McKeen, Hunter S. Thompson (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 50.

10. “Unpublished Jacket Copy for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” in Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Gonzo Papers, Strange Tales from a Strange Time (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 104.

11. Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (New York: Vintage, 1998), 37–40.

12. On Acosta, who sometimes referred to himself as Samoan, see Oscar Zeta Acosta, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972; repr., New York: Vintage, 1989), 5–7, 48. For more on Acosta as madman, see Jann S. Wenner and Corey Seymour, Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson, An Oral Biography (New York: Little, Brown, 2007), 143–44.

13. Thompson, Fear and Loathing, 3–4.

14. Paul Perry, Fear and Loathing: The Strange Saga of Hunter S. Thompson (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2004), 27–29.

15. Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (New York: Ballantine, 1994), 272–73.

16. Thompson, Hell’s Angels, 260.

17. On Thompson and Gatsby see Peter O. Whitmer, When the Going Gets Weird: The Twisted Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson (New York: Hyperion, 1993), 176ff.

18. Thompson to Selma Shapiro (10 September 1968), Thompson to Hughes Rudd (18 October 1968), in Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Honesty of an Outlaw Journalist, 1968–1976, ed., Douglas Brinkley (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 123, 140. On Thompson and the American Dream see Perry, Strange Saga, 123–68.

19. Thompson to Bernard Shir-Cliff (12 December 1969), in Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 229.

20. Ken Cooper, “ ‘Zero Pays the House’: The Las Vegas Novel and Atomic Roulette,” Contemporary Literature 33 (Autumn 1992): 528–44.

21. Thompson to Jim Silberman (15 June 1971), in Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 406.

22. Douglas Brinkley, “Interview with Thompson” (2000), quoted in Jeff Kass, “Still Gonzo After All These Years” (2000), in Conversations with Hunter S. Thompson, ed. Beef Torrey and Kevin Simonson (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 159, 162; James E. Caron, “Hunter S. Thompson’s ‘Gonzo’ Journalism and the Tall Tale in America,” Studies in Popular Culture 8, no. 1 (1985): 1–16.

23. Thompson, Fear and Loathing, 12.

24. Cooper, “Zero Pays the House,” 528–44.

25. Thompson, Fear and Loathing, 24, 47.

26. Perry, Strange and Terrible Saga, 158.

27. Thompson, Fear and Loathing, 27, 106.

28. Allen Hess, Viva Las Vegas: After Hours Entertainment (San Francisco: Chronicle, 1993), 88–89.

29. Thompson, Fear and Loathing, 46.

30. Thompson, Fear and Loathing, 178.

31. Thompson to Jim Silberman (9 May 1971), in Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 384.

32. Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012); Thompson to Silberman (20 February 1973), in Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America, 510. Thompson’s hopes were buoyed by the campaign and nomination of George McGovern, but his defeat was overwhelming.

33. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972). There have been questions about who deserves credit for writing the book. Discussions have often been sexist, supposing Venturi to be the central figure. The book was a collaboration between Venturi and Scott Brown. Izenour’s role has always seemed less clear, hence he is omitted from discussion in this chapter. See Denise Scott Brown, “Sexism and the Star System” (1989), in Scott Brown, Having Words, 79–89. See also Joan Kron, “The Almost Perfect Life of Denise Scott Brown,” Savvy 1 (December 1980): 28–35. On the cover see Kester Rattenbury and Samantha Hardingham, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown: Learning from Las Vegas (London: Routledge, 2007), 30–32; Martino Stierli, Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film, trans. Elizabeth Tucker (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013), 28–47; Aron Vinegar, I Am a Monument: On Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 36–39, 111ff. For excellent discussion on Thompson, as well as Venturi and Scott Brown’s discovery of Vegas as “the key location, both literally and symbolically of postmodern American culture,” see Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 73ff. A nice overview of the book is Louis Hellman, “Learning from Las Vegas,” Built Environment 8, no. 4 (1982), 267–71.

34. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977), 17.

35. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 14, 24.

36. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 66–68, 86; David B. Brownlee, “Form and Content,” in Out of the Ordinary: Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates; Architecture, Urbanism, Design, ed. David B. Brownlee, David G. DeLong, and Kathryn B. Hiesinger (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 22–23; Grace Glueck, “Don’t Knock Sprawl,” New York Times, 10 October 1971, D16.

37. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 116; Brownlee, DeLong, and Hiesinger, Out of the Ordinary, 41. See also Vincent Scully, “Robert Venturi’s Gentle Architecture,” in The Architecture of Robert Venturi, ed. Christopher Mead (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 25–26; Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, A View from the Campidoglio, Selected Essays, 1953–1984, ed. Peter Arnell, Ted Bickford, and Catherine Bergart (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 14–15. For a takedown of the Guild House, see Tom Wolfe, From Our House to Bauhaus (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981), 111.

38. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Architecture as Signs and Systems: For a Modernist Time (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2004), 39.

39. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 100; Gary Wolf, review of Learning from Las Vegas, by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 32 (October 1973): 258–60.

40. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, xviii.

41. Rattenbury and Hardingham, Robert Venturi, 89, 97.

42. Venturi quoted in Rattenbury and Hardingham, Robert Venturi, 69; Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction, 23.

43. Quoted in Vinegar, I Am a Monument, 81. Yet Venturi and Scott Brown could, along with Izenour, write an introduction to a book on Vegas and exclaim, “Long live the big symbol and little building! Long live the building that is a sign! Long live Las Vegas!” In Hess, Viva Las Vegas, 7.

44. Scott Brown, Having Words, 14, 74.

45. Martino Stierli, ed., Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2008), 15.

46. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 58; Scott Brown, Having Words, 15; Rattenbury and Hardingham, Robert Venturi, 81.

47. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 10, 53.

48. Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction, 104.

49. Vladimir Paperny, “An Interview with Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi” (2005), http:/www.paperny.com/venturi.html.

50. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 7–23.

51. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 109.

52. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 64.

53. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 58.

54. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 50–51, 110.

55. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 87, 107; Hess, Viva Las Vegas, 53.

56. Scott Brown, Having Words, 56.

57. Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction, 104.

58. Venturi and Scott Brown, Architecture as Signs, 177.

59. Virginia Wexman, “Pop: The New Architecture,” Soundings 54 (Summer 1971): 191–201.

60. Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction, 20, 22.

61. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 58.

62. Stierli, Rearview Mirror, 132–37.

63. Kenneth Frampton, “America 1960–1970: Notes on Urban Images and Theory,” Casabella 359–60 (December 1971): 33, 36.

64. Tician Papachristou and James Stewart Polshek, “Venturi: Style, Not Substance?” New York Times, 14 November 1971, D24.

65. Frampton, “America 1960–1970,” 36.

66. Denise Scott Brown, “Pop Off: Reply to Kenneth Frampton,” in Venturi and Scott Brown, View from the Campidoglio, 34–37. A later, more measured view is in Martin Filler, “The Spirit of ’76,” New Republic, 16 July 2001, 32, 35. On the relation between the work of Venturi and urban critic Jane Jacobs, see Peter L. Laurence, “Contradictions and Complexities: Jane Jacobs’s and Robert Venturi’s Complexity Theories,” Journal of Architectural Education 59 (February 2006): 49–60.

67. Stierli, Las Vegas Studio, 15.

68. Scott Brown, “Pop Off,” 35.

69. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1977), 9–10, 127–28; Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 39–44. For a devastating critique of Jameson’s failure to acknowledge the politics of the structure, see Mike Davis, “Urban Renaissance and the Spirit of Postmodernism,” New Left Review 151 (May–June 1985): 106–31. Davis was responding to an earlier piece of Jameson’s, about signifiers run wild, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (July–August 1984), esp. 80–84.

70. Scott Brown, “Pop Off,” 115.

71. Quoted in Brownlee, DeLong, and Hiesinger, Out of the Ordinary, 178.

72. Scott Brown, Having Words, 18.

73. Philippe Barrière and Sylvia Lavin, “Interview with Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi,” Perspecta 28 (1997): 133.

74. Many videos of the demolition are available, such as “Pruitt-Igoe Sequence—‘Trouble in Utopia’—Narrated by Robert Hughes [1981],” YouTube, uploaded 12 October 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd7VOz_Wstg. See two special reports, “St. Louis Is Revising Housing Complex,” New York Times, 19 March 1973, 32;“City Life: St. Louis Project Razing Points Up Public Housing Woes: At First It Was Perfect,” New York Times, 16 December 1973, 72

75. Ada Louise Huxtable, “A Prescription for Disaster,” New York Times, 5 November 1972, D23; Jencks, Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 9, 126–28.

Chapter 21

1. Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point (1970; repr., Boston: Beacon, 1990), xxi, 3; Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970; repr., New York: Bantam, 1990), 4, 10–12; 18, 39–41, 55; Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971; repr., New York: Vintage, 1998), 161. On the period, see the excellent work by Andreas Killen, 1973: Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006); Philip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001). For the nervous breakdown at its peak, see Jonathan Mahler, The Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City (New York: Picador, 2005). The Nixon quote is from a first-rate account of American society and politics in this period, Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008), 559.

2. On the works as part of the postmodernist moment, see Brian McHale, “Modernist Reading, Postmodernist Text: The Case of Gravity’s Rainbow,” Poetics Today 1 (Autumn 1979): 85–110; Marc W. Redfield, “Pynchon’s Postmodern Sublime,” PMLA 104 (March 1984): 152–62. For Delany, see Robert Elliot Fox, Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany (New York: Greenwood, 1987), 93–119. Delany rejected the term postmodern. Samuel R. Delany, interview with Matrix Magazine (2001), in Conversations with Samuel R. Delany, ed. Carl Freedman (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009), 72.

3. Good overviews of Gravity’s Rainbow and its bewildering diversity are Robert D. Newman, Understanding Thomas Pynchon (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1986); Thomas Moore, The Style of Connectedness: Gravity’s Rainbow and Thomas Pynchon (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987); William M. Plater, The Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978); Thomas H. Schaub, Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981); Mark Richard Siegel, Creative Paranoia in Gravity’s Rainbow (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1978). On Pynchon, along with other practitioners of black humor of the sixties, see Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 13–14, passim. Excellent essays are in the following collections: George Levine and David Leverenz, eds., Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976); Harold Bloom, ed., Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Chelsea House, 1986); Charles Clerc, ed., Approaches to Gravity’s Rainbow (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983); and Richard Pearce, ed., Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981). On Pynchon’s earlier big novel see W. T. Lhamon Jr., “Pentecost, Promiscuity, and Pynchon’s V.: From the Scaffold to the Impulsive,” in Levine and Leverenz, Mindful Pleasures, 69–86, and his early remarks on Gravity’s Rainbow, “The Most Irresponsible Bastard,” in New Republic, 14 April 1973, 24–28. All readers of the book can profit from Steven C. Weisenberger, A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion, 2nd ed. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006), and Douglas Fowler, A Reader’s Guide to Gravity’s Rainbow (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1980). On epistemology in Pynchon see James W. Earl, “Freedom and Knowledge in the Zone,” in Clerc, Approaches, 229–30; Robert L. Nadeau, “Readings from the New Book of Nature: Physics and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow,” Studies in the Novel 11 (Winter 1979): 454–71; Thomas Melley, “Bodies Incorporated: Scenes of Agency in Gravity’s Rainbow,” Contemporary Literature 35 (Winter 1994): 709–38. A good place to start for Delany is his memoir of early years, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science in the East Village (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), and Delany, About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), esp. 274–75. See also Mary Kay Bray, “Rites of Reversal: Double Consciousness in Delany’s Dhalgren,” Black American Literature Forum 18 (Summer 1984): 57–61; Todd A. Comer, “Playing at Birth: Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren,” Journal of Narrative Theory 35 (Summer 2005): 172–95; K. Leslie Steiner, “Samuel R. Delany,” Pseudopodium, http://www.pseudopodium.org/repress/KLeslieSteiner-SamuelRDelany.html.

4. William Gibson, “The Recombinant City,” in Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren (New York: Vintage, 2001), xi.

5. Edward Mendelson, “Gravity’s Encyclopedia,” and David Leverenz, “On Trying to Read Gravity’s Rainbow,” both in Levine and Leverenz, Mindful Pleasures, 161, 230–31.

6. On the publishing history of the novel see Gerald Howard, “Rocket Redux,” Bookforum 121 (June–September 2005): 32, 36–40.

7. Richard Fariña, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966; repr., New York: Penguin, 1996), 17.

8. Garrison Frost, “Thomas Pynchon and the South Bay,” The Aesthetic, http://www.theaesthetic.com/NewFiles/pynchon.html.

9. Samuel R. Delany, The Motion of Light in Water, 202–3.

10. Delany, Motion, 145, 215f.

11. Samuel R. Delany, interview with Lance Olson (1989), in Freedman, Conversations, 22–23.

12. Peter S. Alterman, “The Surreal Translations of Samuel R. Delany,” Science Fiction Studies 4 (March 1977): 25–34.

13. Delany, Dhalgren, 35, 14.

14. Delany, Dhalgren, 352.

15. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Penguin, 2000), 3.

16. Louis Mackey, “Paranoia, Pynchon, and Preterition,” in Bloom, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, 61.

17. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 21.

18. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 617.

19. On the Emersonian aspects of the novel see Joseph W. Slade, “Religion, Psychology, Sex, and Love in Gravity’s Rainbow,” in Clerc, Approaches, 153, andJoel D. Black, “Probing a Post-Romantic Paleontology: Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow,” boundary2 8 (Winter 1980): 229–54. On the disassembling of Slothrop, see Tony Tanner, “Gravity’s Rainbow: An Experience in Modern Reading,” in Bloom, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, 77; Tanner, “Paranoia, Energy and Displacement,” Wilson Quarterly 2 (Winter 1978): 143–50; Schaub, Pynchon, 135; Mackey, “Paranoia, Pynchon, and Preterition,” 61; Philip E. Simmons, Deep Surfaces: Mass Culture & History in Postmodern American Fiction (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 157–58.

20. Douglas Brinkley and Luke A. Nichter, eds., The Nixon Tapes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014); on the installation see 3–5. On use of the Internal Revenue Service to undermine Nixon’s political opponents see 170, 262.

21. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “The Adventures of Rocketman,” New York Times, 9 March 1973.

22. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 174.

23. Manfred Putz, “The Art of the Acronym in Thomas Pynchon,” Studies in the Novel 23 (Fall 1991): 371–82.

24. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 402.

25. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 650–51.

26. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 729.

27. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 660–68.

28. Emily Nussbaum, “The Great Divide: Norman Lear, Archie Bunker, and the Rise of the Bad Fan,” New Yorker, 7 April 2014, 64, 66, 68.

29. Samuel R. Delany, Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love (New York: Bantam, 1979), 9.

30. Delany, Dhalgren, 349.

31. Delany, Dhalgren, 32, 79.

32. Delany, Dhalgren, 357–58.

33. Delany, Dhalgren, 531.

34. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 9, 13.

35. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 8, 18.

36. Merriam-Webster.com, s.v. “smegma,” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/smegma.

37. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 15–16.

38. Ellen Willis, “Hard to Swallow,” New York Review of Books, 25 January 1973, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1973/jan/25/hard-to-swallow/.

39. On these films and the sexual revolution, see David Allyn, Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution; An Unfettered History (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000), 234ff.

40. “TK Enright Interviews Samuel Delany about Hogg,” (2004), in Freedman, Conversations, 126, 133.

41. Samuel R. Delany, Hogg (Normal, IL: Black Ice, 1994); for one of the gang rapes see 53–64, 186–89; Harold Bloom, “Introduction,” and Richard Poirier, “Rocket Power,” in Bloom, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, 1–2, 20.

42. Samuel R. Delany, The Tides of Lust (Manchester, UK: Savoy, 1980), most readily available as an e-book. For a nuanced view of the ethics of sexual excess in Delany, see Lewis Call, BDSM in American Science Fiction and Fantasy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), esp. 70–71; Mary Catherine Foltz, “The Excremental Ethics of Samuel R. Delany,” SubStance 37, no. 2 (2008): 41–55.

43. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 64–66.

44. Lawrence Wolfey, “Repression’s Rainbow: The Presence of Norman O. Brown in Pynchon’s Big Novel,” PMLA 92 (October 1977): 873–99; Newman, Understanding Thomas Pynchon, 125.

45. Although the word “fuck” is used regularly in the novel, it never refers to sexual intercourse. See Christopher Ames, “Power and the Obscene Word: Discourses of Extremity in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow,” Contemporary Literature 31, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 198.

46. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 237–39.

47. Richard Locke, “One of the Longest, Most Difficult, Most Ambitious Novels in Years,” New York Review of Books, 11 March 1973. On the mystical aspects of sadomasochism see John Hamill, “Confronting the Monolith: Authority and the Cold War in Gravity’s Rainbow,” Journal of American Studies 33 (December 1999): 417–36.

48. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 105.

49. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 333. He also notes that Pynchon’s treatment of Pudding is suggestive of how the Great War figures in our “insane contemporary scene,” 329.

50. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 496, 87.

51. Of course, many have noted the connection between rockets and penises. See Alfred Kazin, “We See From the Periphery, Not the Center: Reflections in an Age of Crisis,” World Literature Today 51 (Spring, 1977), 193. For a more nuanced view, see Leo Bersani, “Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature,” Representations n25 (Winter, 1989), 111. Also, on the assembly of the rocket, Raymond M. Olderman, “The New Consciousness and the Old System,” in Clerc, Approaches, 199–228. On the connection between life and death through the rocket, see Plater, Grim Phoenix, 157.

52. Delany, Dhalgren, 792–94.

53. Delany, Dhalgren, 799–801.

54. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 769.

55. Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 774.

Chapter 22

1. Erica Jong, Fear of Flying: A Novel (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973), 26.

2. Quoted in Gretchen McNeese, “Playboy Interview” (1975), in Conversations with Erica Jong, ed. Charlotte Templin (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2002), 36.

3. Benjamin DeMott, “Couple Trouble: Mod & Trad,” Atlantic, December, 1973, 125; McNeese, “Playboy Interview,” 37; “Book TV 2013 Book Expo America: Erica Jong, ‘Fear of Flying,’ ” YouTube, uploaded 2 July 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z6P3e4V6uY.

4. Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Library of America, 2005), 289.

5. Bernard Avishai, Promiscuous: Portnoy’s Complaint and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).

6. Elaine Showalter and Carol Smith, “An Interview with Erica Jong,” (1974) in Templin, Conversations with Erica Jong, 29.

7. On these films and the sexual revolution, see David Allyn, Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000), 234ff.

8. For a history of women and the struggle see Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage, 1979).

9. Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (New York: Viking, 2000), 172–75; Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

10. Norma McCorvey, I Am Roe: My Life, Roe v. Wade and Freedom of Choice, with Andy Meisler (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 208.

11. Gail Collins, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), 245–48; Billie Jean King, Billie Jean, with Kim Chapin (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 164–87.

12. King, Billie Jean, 180: “It’s a Ms.-Match—Riggs (Oink) Slaughtered,” Los Angeles Times, 21 September 1973, D1.

13. King, Billie Jean, 180; Gerald Eskenazi, “$100,000 Tennis Match: Bobby Riggs vs. Mrs. King,” New York Times, 12 July 1973, 52.

14. Neil Amdur, “ ‘She Played Too Well,’ Says Riggs of Mrs. King,” New York Times, 22 September 1973, 21.

15. On Plath and Sexton see Jong to Pat Barr, 20 October 1973, correspondence, Erica Jong Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library Collection, Columbia University (hereafter Jong Papers); Erica Jong, Half-Lives (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973), 93, 39.

16. Erica Jong, “Writing a First Novel,” Twentieth Century Literature 20, no. 4 (October 1974): 264–66.

17. All quotes from John Updike, “Jong Love,” New Yorker, 17 December 1973, 149–51.

18. Reprinted in Erica Jong, The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller (New York: Grove, 1993), 11.

19. Milford to Jong, 28 August 1973, Jong Papers.

20. Ellen Hope Meyer, “The Aesthetics of Dear Diary,” The Nation, 12 January 1974, 55–56.

21. Patricia Meyer Spacks, “Fiction Chronicle,” Hudson Review 27, no. 2 (Summer 1974): 285, 291.

22. Alfred Kazin, “The Writer as Sexual Show-Off; or, Making Press Agents Unnecessary,” New York, 9 June 1975, 40–41.

23. Molly Haskell, “Review of Fear of Flying,” Village Voice Literary Supplement, 22 November 1973, 27.

24. Charlotte Templin, Feminism and the Politics of Literary Reputation: The Example of Erica Jong (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 1.

25. McNeese, “Playboy Interview,” 52, 47.

26. McNeese, “Playboy Interview,” 40.

27. Barbara A. Bannon, “Erica Jong” (1977), in Templin, Conversations with Erica Jong, 71.

28. Jane Wilson, “Erica Jong: Her Life is an Open Book,” Los Angeles Times, 24 November 1974, D1, D9.

29. Ozick to Jong, 26 July 1973; Jong to Ozick, 13 August 1973, Jong Papers.

30. Robert Louit, “Erica Jong: Writing about Sex Is Harder for a Woman” (1978), in Templin, Conversations with Erica Jong, 85.

31. Robert J. Butler, “The Woman Writer as American Picaro: Open Journeying in Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying,” Centennial Review 31, no. 3 (Summer 1987): 308–29; Joan Reardon, “Fear of Flying: Developing the Feminist Novel,” International Journal of Women’s Studies 1 (1978): 306–20.

32. Erica Jong, Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2006), 70.

33. Jong, Fear of Flying, 293–94.

34. Jong, Fear of Flying, 328–29.

35. Jong, Fear of Flying, 331.

36. Jong, Fear of Flying, 339.

37. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), 5–7.

38. Haskell, “Review,” 27.

39. For a lesbian version of Isadora, but one with more confidence about her sexuality and place in the world, see Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle (1973; repr., New York: Bantam, 1988).

40. Judith Willhite Will to Jong, 8 January 1975; Seena Lee Brooks to Jong, 8 November 1974; Gene Steinmann to Jong, 13 November 1975; Charles Young to Jong, 7 January 1975, all in Jong Papers.

41. John Kern, “Erica: Being the True History of the Adventures of Isadora Wing, Fanny Hackabout-Jones, and Erica Jong” (1981), in Templin, Conversations with Erica Jong, 125; Charlotte Templin, “Interview with Erica Jong” (1990), in Templin, Conversations, 166 with Erica Jong.

42. Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1986), 176–78.

Chapter 23

1. Thomas McEvilley, “Art in the Dark,” Artforum 21 (Summer 1983): 62–71; Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 102. On his fascination with crucifixion see Donald Kuspit, “Chris Burden: The Feel of Power,” in Chris Burden: A Twenty-Year Survey (Newport Harbor, CA: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1988), 37.

2. Chris Burden interview, High Performance 2, no. 1 (March 1979): 7, 9.

3. Matthew Day Jackson, “TV AD,” in Lisa Phillips, ed., Chris Burden: Extreme Measures (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2013), 170; Larry Grobel, “Chris Burden: Picasso Used Canvas. Michelangelo Used Marble. Chris Burden Uses His Body,” Playgirl, April 1978, 64.

4. Frazer Ward, No Innocent Bystanders: Performance and Audience (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2012), 7–11. On Burden see 81–108.

5. Sydney Smith, “Chris Burden Talks about Performance, Is Confused about iPods at the New Museum,” NYU Local, 15 November 2013, http://nyulocal.com/entertainment/2013/11/15/chris-burden-talks-about-sculpture-performance-and-those-sticks-with-the-music-on-them-at-the-new-museum/. See the measured comments on Burden in Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 111.

6. Peter Schjeldahl, “Performance: Chris Burden and the Limits of Art,” New Yorker 14 May 2007.

7. Chris Burden, “In Conversation with Jon Bewley,” in Adrian Searle, Talking Art 1: Chris Burden, Sophie Calle, Leon Golub, Dan Graham, Richard Hamilton, Susan Hiller, Mary Kelly, Andres Serrano, Nancy Spero (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1993), 26. Jump ahead a few decades to 2004. In a performance art class at UCLA, students were doing their final projects in front of the class and the professor, Ron Athey. In the 1990s, Athey had been famous for doing violence to his body. In one piece, he “inserted a series of hyperdermic [sic] needles into his arm from wrist to shoulder and then jabbed a 15-cm [6 in] long needle through his scalp.” According to Athey, the performance depicted his HIV-positive status, his depression, and his long history of suffering, as well as being an exploration into the pleasure of pain.

Joseph Deutch was the last student to perform. Looking dapper in coat and tie, instead of his usual sloppy attire, Deutch in front of the class pulled out a handgun from a paper bag and proceeded to load a single bullet into the gun’s chamber. He then spun the cylinder, aimed the pistol at his head, and pulled the trigger. The gun did not fire, and Deutch left the room. A moment later, the sound of the gun discharging was heard.

He returned to find the classroom in “pandemonium.” Deutch explained that the gun was a fake (supposedly a hand-carved replica of a .357 magnum) and the explosion in the hall nothing more than a “big firecracker” going off in a can. His intention, he related, was “to test whether, in this seen-it-all-age, an audience still could have an indelibly shocking experience and be left wondering whether what it had witnessed was make-believe or real.” One student complained to university officials and an investigation ensued, but no disciplinary action was taken against the student.

At the time of this performance, Burden was a superstar professor in the art department. When he learned of the performance, he was angry and stunned, calling it an act of “domestic terrorism.” He wanted the student expelled from the university. When the school declined to punish Deutch, Burden and his wife, fellow artist Nancy Rubins, retired in protest. When Deutch learned of their displeasure, he stated, “The thing I hadn’t counted on was Chris and Nancy’s freaking out to the extent they did.”

Burden claimed that the audiences for his artwork knew what to expect. This was true to an extent, but the violence that he absorbed surely had an emotional effect upon those present. By 2004, when violence was hardly unexpected or out of place on college campuses and society at large, perhaps Burden’s disgust was that such a performance could shock precisely because gun violence had become so common. If so, then the violence of the New Sensibility, once aesthetic and presumably a palliative experience, had become ingrained in the crust of reality. It is unknown what grade Deutch received for his work. Tracey Warr, eds., The Artist’s Body (London: Phaidon, 2000), 110; Jenny Hontz, “Gunplay as Art, Sets Off a Debate,” Los Angeles Times, 5 February 2005, B7, 13; Mike Boehm, “The Shot ‘Heard’ ‘round UCLA,” Los Angeles Times, 9 July 2009; “UCLA Student Who Staged Russian-Roulette Says It Was a Test,” Blouin ArtInfo, 23 January 2007, http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/699/ucla-student-who-staged-russian-roulette-suicide-says-it-was-a-test.

8. Glenn Phillips, “Interview with Chris Burden” (18 May 2010), in Rebecca McGrew and Glenn Phillips, eds., It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles, 1969–1973 (Claremont, CA: Pomona College Museum of Art, 2011), 272.

9. Grobel, “Chris Burden,” 51.

10. Fred Hoffman, “Chris Burden: Some Reflections,” in Chris Burden (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Locus +, 2007), 356; George Melrod, “Interview: Chris Burden,” Art Ltd., August, 2012, http://www.artltdmag.com/index.php?subaction=showfull&id=1346451183&archive=&start_from=&ucat=28&; Ward, No Innocent Bystanders, 86–87.

11. Grace Glueck, “Winning the West,” New York Times, 16 April 1962, D19.

12. Paul Schimmel, quoted in Jan Herman, “Burden Takes Art from Crucifixion to Re-Creation,” Los Angeles Times (26 April 1988), D9.

13. Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); Michael Kirby, Happenings (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1965); Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). On the intersections and differences between Kaprow and Burden, see Linda Frye Burnham, “Performance Art in Southern California: An Overview,” in Performance Anthology: Source Book for a Decade of California Performance Art, ed. Carl E. Loeffler (San Francisco: Contemporary Arts, 1980), 390–403. For an excellent overview of performance art, with an emphasis on how it changed the relationship between artist and audience and replaced the object with experience, see Sayre, Object of Performance.

14. Richard Meyer, “Bone of Contention,” Artforum (November 2004): 73, 74, 249. Chicano/Chicana artists used performance not only to show the Mexican presence in the United States but to critique America’s racism and isolationist pretensions. For an overview of performance art see the essays in Peggy Phelan, ed., Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970–1983 (New York: Routledge, 2012).

15. “Chris Burden: The Church of Human Energy; An Interview with Willoughby Sharp and Liza Béar,” Avalanche 8 (Summer/Fall 1973): 54; Andrew McClintock, “In Conversation with Chris Burden,” San Francisco Arts Quarterly, 5 October 2013, http://www.sfaqonline.com/2013/10/in-conversation-with-chris-burden/.

16. Howard Singerman, “Chris Burden’s Pragmatism,” in Burden, Twenty-Year Survey, 22.

17. Chris Burden, 214–15; Burden, High Performance interview, 6.

18. Malcolm Green, “Otto Mühl, 1925–2013,” Artforum, October 2013, 59–60; Loeffler, Performance Anthology, 10–11.

19. Cole Matson, “Risk to Life: The Ethics of Chris Burden’s ‘Shoot,’ ” Transpositions, 2012, http://www.transpositions.co.uk/risk-to-life-ethics-of-chris-burdens-shoot/.

20. Bill Billiter, “Performance Art: Practice is Creating a Controversy,” Los Angeles Times, 18 May 1983, 10.

21. Peter Plagens, “He Got Shot—For His Art,” New York Times, 2 September 1973, 1, 3.

22. Chris Burden and Jan Butterfield, “Through the Night Softly,” in The Art of Performance: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battock and Robert Nickas (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984), 221.

23. Grobel, “Chris Burden,” 50.

24. G. Phillips, “Interview with Chris Burden,” 281.

25. Helene Winer, “Burden at Pomona,” in L. Phillips., Extreme Measures, 162–64; Paul McMahon, “In the Front Row for Chris Burden’s Match Piece, 1972,” East of Borneo, 12 October, 2012, http://www.eastofborneo.org/articles/in-the-front-row-for-chris-burdens-emmatch-pieceem-1972.

26. On Burden’s “masochism,” see Kathy O’Dell, Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), esp. 1–16.

27. Chris Burden, 54–55.

28. Chris Burden, 56–57.

29. L. Phillips, Extreme Measures, 157–58, 227.

30. Chris Burden, Esquire, May 1973, 165.

31. On the upheaval of this period see Andreas Killen, 1973: Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), and Philip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

32. Paul Schimmel, “Other Words: Interview with Chris Burden” (October 1994/January 1996), in Chris Burden: Beyond the Limits/Jenseits der Grenzen, ed. Peter Noever (Vienna: MAK, 1996), 39.

33. Thomas Crow, “Mind-Body,” 48; L. Phillips, “Double Bind,” 18; Amelia Jones, “Bridges,” 123, all in L. Phillips, Extreme Measures.

34. William Wilson, “This Is Art—These People Are Artists,” Los Angeles Times, 24 March 1972, 14.

35. “Church of Human Energy,” 54.

36. Melrod, “Interview.”

37. Burden, High Performance interview, 6.

38. Chris Burden, 152–53.

39. L. Phillips, Extreme Measures, 225.

40. L. Phillips, Extreme Measures, 228.

41. Matson, “Risk to Life.”

42. Burden, “In Conversation with Jon Bewley,” 20. On the ethical implications, see Frazer Ward, “Gray Zone: Watching Shoot,” October 95 (Winter 2001): 115–30.

43. L. Phillips, Extreme Measures, 224; Roger Ebert, “Chris Burden: ‘My God, Are They Going to Leave Me Here To Die?,’ ” Chicago Sun-Times, 25 May 1975, available online at http://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/chris-burden-my-god-are-they-going-to-leave-me-here-to-die.

44. Burden, “In Conversation with Jon Bewley,” 21.

45. L. Phillips, Extreme Measures, 228, 63.

46. Ebert, “Chris Burden.”

Conclusion

1. Kenneth Silverman, Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 264–66; John Cage, Empty Words: Writings, ’73–’78 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981), 180–82 passim. Cage’s interview about the piece is available online at https://archive.org/details/Cage_interview_and_performance_Empty_words_August_1974_A002A.

2. James Wolcott, “Review of Lou Reed, Metal Music Machine,” Rolling Stone, 14 August 1975, available online at http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/metal-machine-music-19750814. A more favorable view of the recording is Louis Pattison, “Metal Music Machine,” in “Lou Reed: The Ultimate Music Guide,” special issue, Uncut, 2014, 48–49.

3. Eliot Kidd, quoted in. Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, eds., Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (New York: Grove, 1996), 259–60. Excellent on punk is Will Hermes, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever (New York: Faber & Faber, 2011).

4. Norman Mailer, “The Faith of Graffiti,” Esquire, May 1974), 77–80, 88, 154, 157–58.

5. David Steigerwald, Culture’s Vanities: The Paradox of Cultural Diversity in a Globalized World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 27–28. See also Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1986), 170–71.

6. Very good on Koons and the unacceptable excesses of the art world is Sarah Thornton, 33 Artists in 3 Acts (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). On art and commerce see Pierre Bourdieu and Hans Haacke, Free Exchange (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 104. Very useful for understanding art today is Timothy Van Laar and Leonard Diepeveen, Artworld Perspective: Arguing Cultural Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

7. Although not discussed within this book, the earthworks of artists such as Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, and Walter De Maria, with their combination of maximalism (huge areas of land) and minimalism (in terms of form), fits perfectly into the New Sensibility as worked out by Cage. See, for example, Suzann Boettger, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 211–45.

8. Michiko Kakutani, “A Lucy and Ethel for an Age after Blogs,” New York Times, 1 July 2014, C1.

9. For measured comments on Burden and when violent art may be justified, see Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 10, 108–11.

10. Karen Finley, A Different Kind of Intimacy: A Memoir (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2000), 79.

11. Cary Levine, Pay for Your Pleasures: Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, and Raymond Petitbon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 119–20.

12. Much has been written on the piece. A good starting point is Jerry Saltz, “Kara Walker Bursts Into Three Dimensions, and Flattens Me,” Vulture, 31 May 2014, http://www.vulture.com/2014/05/art-review-kara-walker-a-subtlety.html.