This book charts the changing complexion of American culture in one of the most culturally vibrant of twentieth-century decades. It provides a vivid account of the major cultural forms of 1960s America – music and performance; film and television; fiction and poetry; art and photography – as well as influential texts, trends and figures of the decade: from Norman Mailer to Susan Sontag; from Muhammad Ali’s anti-war protests to Tom Lehrer’s stand-up comedy; from Bob Dylan to Rachel Carson; and from Pop Art to photojournalism. A chapter on new social movements demonstrates that a current of conservatism runs through even the most revolutionary movements of the 1960s and the book as a whole looks to the West and especially to the South in the making of the sixties as myth and as history.

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