The architects of America’s cultural revolution of the 1960s were Beat authors like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and celebrated figures like Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, Eldridge Cleaver and Susan Sontag. In examining the lives and works of those who spoke for the 1960s, Roger Kimball conceives a series of cautionary tales, an annotated guidebook of wrong turns, dead-ends, and blind alleys.
According to Kimball, the revolutionary assaults on “The System” in the 1960s still define the way we live now, with intellectually debased schools and colleges, morally chaotic sexual relations and family life, and a degraded media and popular culture. While some may think of the 1960s as “the Last Good Time,” Kimball paints the decade as a seedbed of excess and moral breakdown
Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of the New Criterion. He is author of Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education and editor of several books on art and politics.
Raymond Todd is an actor and director in the theater as well as a poet and documentary filmmaker. He plays jazz trombone for the Leatherstocking quartet, an ensemble that gets its name from one of his favorite Blackstone narrations, The Deerslayer. Todd lives in New York.