Posted on 05/13/2008 1:13:01 PM PDT by forkinsocket
Much has been made of 1968 — the student uprisings in Paris, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the full flowering of youth culture. But what of its more unassuming antecedent, 1958? Fifty years ago, Eisenhower was in the White House, the country was in a recession and the American intellectual scene was crackling with energy.
The year saw the advent of everything from Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and Dr. Seuss’ “Yertle the Turtle” to “Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak, that year’s Nobel laureate in literature; the first American edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita”; Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”; John Kenneth Galbraith’s “Affluent Society”; Philip Roth’s story “Goodbye, Columbus”; and Jack Kerouac’s “Dharma Bums” — not to mention Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape,” Harold Pinter’s “Birthday Party,” Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” and Orson Welles’s “Touch of Evil.” Robert Frank captured the uncertain tenor of the time in his 1958 photography book, “The Americans,” as did Jasper Johns in his 1958 painting “Three Flags,” in which he superimposed three American flags, each smaller than the next, transforming the familiar into the abstract, the iconic into the unsettled.
It’s hard to generalize about any historical moment, but in the intellectual journals of the era, some central themes emerge: a debate over the merits of the Beat movement, and the attempt by some influential critics to preserve the quickly dissolving distinctions among highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow culture that had previously held sway. At the same time, the distinction between artistic achievement and commercial success, which American intellectuals had long assumed to be mutually exclusive, was losing its hold.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
And Kerouac and Nabokov were staunch anti-communists.
yeah I remember the “intellectuals” of ‘58 alright....abstract “painters” that couldn’t draw....blank verse “poets” that couldn’t rhyme....cool jazz “musicians” that couldn’t keep time....lotta frauds called themselves “artists” back then.
I was ten in 1958. I recall Sputnik and standing on the beach with a crowd of relatives waiting for it to pass overhead (yes, you could actually see it).
I recall telling my Grade 5 teacher I wanted to be an astronaut and her telling me that girls could be nothing but teachers, nurses, mommies, and if they were too stupid to go to college, secretaries.
That is what I remember about 1958.
Was Milton still writing in 1958?
Pastrnak was not really imprisoned (though he was forced to "unaccept" the prize), but the cartoon is still a good one.
I'm pretty sure that wasn't sputnik you saw, but rather it's booster rocket.
it’s = its
(Grrr)
My point was that rhyming isn’t a criteria for great poetry.
I’ll never forget 1958. That was the year I learned to use the toilet.
http://www.orwell.ru/library/novels/Animal_Farm/english/efp_go
He was sickened by how they turned a blind eye toward, and self-censored discourse on, Russia for the sake of their Utopian dreams. See if it reminds you of anyone in our day.
I wasn’t even a glimmer in my Daddy’s eye in 1958.
I always liked ‘58 Chevys...
I read “One Day in the Life of Ivan Spell Check” In the crapper when it was published in Look in 1960. I spent my freshman year reading “Doctor Zhivago” to the exclusion of other studies.
Well they told us it was Sputnik.
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