Description
Book SynopsisAs the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, we are accustomed to think, American life passed from a time of placidity to one of turbulence, from complacency to dissent, from consensus to conflict, and from behavioral conformity to the virtues or vices of individual liberation. Some have celebrated this apparent transformation as a necessary change, which helped undermine oppressive racial and sexual hierarchies, challenge the unearned authority of experts, and question the aura surrounding those holding social and political power. Others, including even some critics of the order of things in the Fifties, lament America's subsequent unraveling, due to the confusion and excess that accompanied the erosion of strong foundations for social stability. Either wayviewing the time as a dark age or proud decadehistorians and other observers have generally viewed the 1950s as a period noteworthy for its holism. Things hung together, before they fell apart. Over the past two decades, however, historians
Trade ReviewAt The Center is an impressive synthesis of American Thought and Culture for a critical period. The range and depth of knowledge makes this book indispensable for scholars and students. Familiar figures receive their due along with others less well known but deserving. The book is at once authoritative and accessible. -- George Cotkin, author of Existential America and Feast of Excess
This revisionist account of the long 1950s in American intellectual life is both exciting and timely. Showing how across different domains artists and thinkers sought coherence after depression and war without renouncing their insights into flux and historicity, Borus, Blake and Brick make clear that the boundary to the experimentation and upheaval of the 1960s was much more porous than usually thought. Without apologizing for its limitations, they have saved a pregnant era from the condescension of posterity. -- Samuel Moyn, Yale University
