Previous Convictions: A Journey through the 1950s

In this richly documented history of American culture in the 1950s, New York Times film writer Sayre shares reminiscences of family friends H.L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, and E.B. White, among others, and the wild crowd she ran with, younger writers such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Dylan Thomas. She describes with great care the politics and mores of the day, including racism, anticommunist extremism and the new "cult of the teenager" that would come into its own a decade later. Sayre is often funny--her take on weird, passing trends like "intensely competitive, wrathful gourmet cooking" is worth the price of the book--and she puts the lie to the 1950s' undeserved reputation for having been a drab, conformist, and utterly uninteresting time.