William S. Burroughs

Dystopian literature is a potent vehicle for criticizing existing social conditions or political systems, and for warning against the potential negative consequences of utopian thought. This reference is a guide to dystopian theory and literature. It discusses the work of key theorists and summarizes several important utopian works to provide a background. The rest of the book summarizes and analyzes numerous dystopian novels, plays, and films.

An interdisciplinary exploration of the Beat Generation, its intersections with mainstream & experimental film & the interactions of all of these with American society & the culture of the 1950s.

Roger Kimball shows how the 'cultural revolution' of the 1960s and '70s took hold in America, lodging in our hearts and minds, and in our innermost assumptions about what counts as the good life. Kimball believes that the counterculture transformed high culture as well as our everyday life in terms of attitudes toward self and country, sex and drugs, and manners and morality. Believing that this dramatic change "cannot be understood apart from the seductive personalities who articulated its goals", he intersperses his argument with incisive portraits of the life and thought of Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, Susan Sontag, Eldridge Cleaver and other 'cultural revolutionaries' who made their mark. For all that has been written about the counterculture, until now there has not been a chronicle of how this revolutionary movement succeeded and how its ideas helped provoke today's 'culture wars'. This book fills this gap with a compelling and well-informed narrative that is sure to provoke discussion and debate.

Few eras in U.S. history have begun with more optimistic promise and ended in more pessimistic despair than the 1960s. When J.F.K. became president in 1960, the U.S. was the hope of the world. Ten years later American power abroad seemed wasted in the jungles of Indochina, and critics at home wondered whether the U.S. was really the "land of the free and the home of the brave." This book takes an encyclopedic look at the decade--at the individuals who shaped the era, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the youth rebellion. It covers the political, military, social, cultural, religious, economic, and diplomatic topics that made the 1960s a unique decade in U.S. history.