New York in the '50s (55 page)

Nat Hentoff didn't want to be typecast as a jazz critic, and started his column in the Village Voice to write about education, civil rights, books, and politics. (
National Endowment for the Arts
)

As a young
New York Times
reporter, Gay Talese (second from left) recorded the homespun wisdom of Harry Truman during the ex-President's morning constitutionals along Park Avenue. (
Courtesy Gay Talese
)

As a precocious young critic and editor, Norman Podhoretz wrote that the Beat Generation was “a conspiracy to overthrow civilization” and replace it with “the world of the adolescent street gang.” (
Gert Berliner
)

Allen Ginsberg reading his poem “King of May.” Ginsberg made writers and rebels welcome at his Lower East Side pad, where he lived with his poet companion Peter Orlovsky. (
Engramma.it
)

Charles Mingus was one of those jazz stars whose innovative music drew hip crowds of painters, poets, and musicians to the Five Spot. (
Tom Marcello
)

Billie Holiday at the Downbeat club in 1947. Holiday was banned from singing in New York nightclubs for more than a decade because of her arrest for heroin possession, but she gave a concert at the Loew's Sheridan theater that packed the house in 1957. (
William P. Gottlieb Collection, Library of Congress
)

Ike was happy to leave the presidency of Columbia University to become President of the United States. (
University Archives, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University
)

Sociologist C. Wright Mills's books
White Collar
and
The Power Elite
shook up the status quo and set the stage for the New Left of the sixties. (
Yaroslava Mills
)

No man in a gray flannel suit, Mills roared into Columbia on his motorcycle like an intellectual guerrilla warrior. (
Yaroslava Mills
)

Novelist, essayist, critic, and editor, Robert Phelps was a literary friend and guru to countless writers who, like Dan Wakefield, adopted him as “Uncle Bobby.” (
Rosemarie Beck
)

Editor and critic Marion Magid went to Barnard from the Bronx and discovered “the cultural encounter of Jews and goyim, New York and Midwest.” (
Gert Berliner
)

Dylan Thomas was a secular priest of a generation who chanted his poetry at the White Horse Tavern, where he had his last drink before dying at nearby St. Vincent's Hospital. (
Library of Congress
)

Index

abortion,
234–38

Actors' Studio,
146
,
148

Adler, Jane,
58

Adler, Renata,
69

African Queen, The
(film),
276

Agee, James,
134
,
150
,
285
,
321
;
A Death in the Family
,
150
; film scripts by,
276
; as journalist,
287
,
289
; letters to Father Flye,
150
;
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
,
60
,
106
,
274
,
285