Out of the Sixties: Storytelling and the Vietnam Generation

Description

In a highly original study, David Wyatt takes a broad, yet personal, look at the cultural legacy of the sixties through ten creative figures who came of age during the Vietnam War. Wyatt argues that it is each artist's 'personal engagement' with his own era that binds together the achievements of storytellers such as filmmaker George Lucas, songwriter Bruce Springsteen, playwright Sam Shepard, journalist Michael Herr, writers Ann Beattie, Alice Walker, Ethan Mordden, Sue Miller, and poets Gregory Orr and Louise Gluck. For some their work is marked by the war and concerned directly with it; in others, Vietnam represents the prevailing counterculture sensibility often associated with the sixties. Out of the experience new voices emerge - from Michael Herr's landmark invention of a new journalistic voice in his Vietnam War reporting to Bruce Springsteen's tapping of the working class decline in postwar America. The thread that ties the various genres and visions together and that which constitutes Wyatt's own critical aesthetic, is the centrality of the personal response and the seamlessness, therefore, of identity and history.

"...a provocative, compelling, and useful study of artists whose work reflects the sensibilities and politics of the sixties...Out of the Sixties offers important and intelligent insights into both looking at and feeling about that window of experience." Regina Barreca, American Literature "...Wyatt's essays are remarkably readable and illuminating...What is most joyously liberating in these studies is the nature of Wyatt's engagement--the vibrant personalism of tone and meditation. Wyatt lets his readers know that something is at stake for him in these texts and in the issues they at once respond to and introduce." Philip K. Jackson, Contemporary Literature