This fascinating anthology collects notable New Yorker pieces from the most tumultuous years of the twentieth century--including work by James Baldwin, Pauline Kael, Sylvia Plath, Roger Angell, and Muriel Spark--alongside new assessments of the 1960s by some of today’s finest writers. Here are real-time accounts of these years, brought to immediate and profound life: Calvin Trillin reports on the integration of Southern universities, E. B. White and John Updike wrestle with the enormity of the Kennedy assassination, and Jonathan Schell travels with American troops into the jungles of Vietnam. Some of the truly timeless works of American journalism came out of The New Yorker that decade, including Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, all excerpted here. The arts, too, underwent an extraordinary transformation, with the magazine publishing such indelible short story masterpieces as John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” and John Updike’s “A & P”; iconic poems by Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton; and in-depth profiles of crucial cultural figures like Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and Muhammad Ali (when he was still Cassius Clay). This collection of groundbreaking pieces is also given contemporary context by current New Yorker writers, resulting in an incomparable portrait of a truly galvanizing era. Including contributions by Renata Adler • Roger Angell • Hannah Arendt • James Baldwin • Truman Capote • Rachel Carson • John Cheever • Mavis Gallant • Pauline Kaell • Jane Kramer • John McPhee • Sylvia Plath • Muriel Spark • Calvin Trillin • John Updike • E. B. White And featuring new perspectives by Jennifer Egan • Malcolm Gladwell • Dana Goodyear • Adam Gopnik • Jill Lepore • Larissa MacFarquhar • Evan Osnos • George Packer • Kelefa Sanneh Praise for The 60s: The Story of a Decade “The third installment in the esteemed magazine’s superb decades series . . . The contributor list is an embarrassment of riches. . . . The hits continue. Bring on the '70s.” -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “[ The 60s ] deserves a lasting place on one’s shelves. Like its predecessors in the series, this collection is a time capsule and a keeper.” -- Booklist ...

“The third installment in the esteemed magazine’s superb decades series . . . The contributor list is an embarrassment of riches. . . . The hits continue. Bring on the '70s.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[The 60s] deserves a lasting place on one’s shelves. Like its predecessors in the series, this collection is a time capsule and a keeper.”—Booklist

Auteur

The New Yorker

Résumé
*This fascinating anthology collects notable *New Yorker pieces from the most tumultuous years of the twentieth century—including work by James Baldwin, Pauline Kael, Sylvia Plath, Roger Angell, and Muriel Spark—alongside new assessments of the 1960s by some of today’s finest writers.

Here are real-time accounts of these years, brought to immediate and profound life: Calvin Trillin reports on the integration of Southern universities, E. B. White and John Updike wrestle with the enormity of the Kennedy assassination, and Jonathan Schell travels with American troops into the jungles of Vietnam. Some of the truly timeless works of American journalism came out of The New Yorker *that decade, including Truman Capote’s *In Cold Blood, *Rachel Carson’s *Silent Spring, *and James Baldwin’s *The Fire Next Time, *all excerpted here. The arts, too, underwent an extraordinary transformation, with the magazine publishing such indelible short story masterpieces as John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” and John Updike’s “A & P”; iconic poems by Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton; and in-depth profiles of crucial cultural figures like Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and Muhammad Ali (when he was still Cassius Clay). This collection of groundbreaking pieces is also given contemporary context by current *New Yorker writers, resulting in an incomparable portrait of a truly galvanizing era.

Including contributions by Renata Adler • Roger Angell • Hannah Arendt • James Baldwin • Truman Capote • Rachel Carson • John Cheever • Mavis Gallant • Pauline Kaell • Jane Kramer • John McPhee • Sylvia Plath • Muriel Spark • Calvin Trillin • John Updike • E. B. White 
 
And featuring new perspectives by Jennifer Egan • Malcolm Gladwell • Dana Goodyear • Adam Gopnik • Jill Lepore • Larissa MacFarquhar • Evan Osnos • George Packer • Kelefa Sanneh

Praise for The 60s: The Story of a Decade

“[The 60s] deserves a lasting place on one’s shelves. Like its predecessors in the series, this collection is a time capsule and a keeper.”—Booklist

Échantillon de lecture
Part One Reckonings

A Note by George Packer

These days, the quarter century between the Second World War and the 1970s seems like at least an American silver age. The middle class was big and prosperous. Leaders in government, business, and labor worked out compromises that kept the deal table level and the payout fair. National institutions worked pretty well, and under stress they didn’t collapse. Congress responded to civil-rights protests with sweeping, bipartisan legislation; environmental awareness produced the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. As Richard H. Rovere wrote in “Half Out of Our Tree,” even the protests over the war in Vietnam showed that American democracy still had a pulse—a strong one by today’s standards.

Read the journalism of the 1960s and you might not think so. If the country now seems to be painfully breaking down, in the sixties it was quite dramatically exploding. The sense of continuous crisis forced a change in the journalism that appeared in The New Yorker. The magazine lost its habitual cool, its restraint. It began to publish big, ambitious reports and essays that attempted to meet the apocalyptic occasion. These pieces were intended to make noise, even to shock the national mind, and they dominated conversation for weeks or months. In the sixties, The New Yorker acquired a social consciousness. It went into opposition, challenging the complacent postwar consensus that had prevailed across American culture, including in its pages. The result was some of the most famous and influential journalism ever to appear in the magazine.

This work occupied so much territory—paid for by the voluminous and high-end advertising that used to fill The New Yorker’s pages—that some of the pieces took up an entire issue, or else spread themselves out over two, three, or even five in succession. Ambitious work had often appeared in the magazine, but the pieces from the sixties were something more than stories enjoying the luxury of a lot of space to be well and fully told. This was journalism as event. Sometimes the events arrived so fast and thick that readers could barely catch their breath. Rachel Carson’s warning of the effects of chemical spraying on bir…