The Fabulous Fifties & the Swinging Sixties: Culture, Technology, and Literature in the 1950s &
1960s
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Home Construction
o “Suburbia”
Aerospace Industries
o Boeing
 707
o “Air Force One”
Changes in Labor
o White Collar
o Blue Collar
o Effects on Unions
Women
o Women & Workforce
 “Pink Collar”
o “Cult of Domesticity”
 Television
 “Ozzie and Harriet”
 “Leave It to Beaver”
o Feminism
 Betty Friedan
 The Feminine Mystique
Consumer Culture
o Diner’s Club Card
o McDonald’s
o Disneyland
o Expansion of Television
 Networks
 Advertising
 Religion
 “Televangelists”
 Billy Graham
 Oral Roberts
 Fulton J. Sheen
 Sports
o Sports Move West
 Giants
 New York to San Francisco
 Dodgers
 Brooklyn to Los Angeles
o Music
 Rock ‘n’ Roll
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 Elvis Presley
o “Movie Stars”
 Marilyn Monroe
o Consumerism & Sexualization
 Playboy Magazine
Critics of Consumerism
o David Riesman
 The Lonely Crowd
o William H. Whyte, Jr.
 The Organization Man
o Sloan Wilson
 The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
o John Kenneth Galbraith
 The Affluent Society
o Daniel Bell
 The Coming of Post-Industrial Society
 The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
o C. Wright Mills
 The Power Elite
Literature
o Ernest Hemingway
 The Old Man and the Sea
o John Steinbeck
 East of Eden
 Travels with Charley
o Realistic Writing
 Norman Mailer
 The Naked and the Dead
 James Jones
 From Here to Eternity
o “Fantastic” Prose
 Joseph Heller
 Catch-22
 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr
 Slaughterhouse Five
o John Updike
 Rabbit, Run
 Couples
o John Cheever
 The Wapshot Chronicle
 The Wapshot Scandal
o Louis Auchincloss
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 upper-class New Yorkers
o Gore Vidal
 historical novels
 Myra Breckinridge
o WASP (White Angle-Saxon Protestant)
Poetry
o Ezra Pound
o Wallace Stevens
o William Carlos Williams
o Theodore Roethke
o Robert Lowell
 For the Union Dead
o Sylvia Plath
 Ariel
 The Bell Jar
o Anne Sexton
o John Berryman
Playwrights
o Tennessee Williams
 A Streetcar Named Desire
 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
o Arthur Miller
 Death of a Salesman
 The Crucible
o Edward Albee
 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
o Lorraine Hansberry
 A Raisin in the Sun
African American Authors
o Richard Wright
 Native Son
o Ralph Ellison
 Invisible Man
o James Baldwin
 The Fire Next Time
o LeRoi Jones / Imamu Amiri Baraka
 Dutchman
Southern Literature
o William Faulkner
o Walker Percy
o Eudora Welty
o Robert Penn Warren
 All the King’s Men
o Flannery O’Connor
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o William Styron
 The Confessions of Nat Turner
Jewish novelists
o Yiddish
o J. D. Salinger
 Catcher in the Rye
o Bernard Malamud
 The Assistant
 The Natural
o Philip Roth
 Goodbye, Columbus
 Portnoy’s Complaint
o Saul Bellow
 The Adventures of Augie March
 Herzog
o Isaac Bashevis Singer
o E. L. Doctorow
 The Book of Daniel
 Ragtime
 World’s Fair
 Billy Bathgate
Transition from 50s to 60s
o Struggles
 Racism – Civil Rights Movement
 Poverty
 Vietnam
o Attitudes toward authority
o Disillusionment
o Morality
o Catholic Church
o Skepticism& Restlessness
 Allen Ginseberg
 Jack Kerouc
 James Dean
 Rebel without a Cause
1960s Counter-Culture
o University of Carolina at Berkley
o Free Speech Movement
 Mario Savio
o Increasing radicalism
o Drug Use
o Hippies
“Sexual Revolution”
o Dr. Alfred Kinsey
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 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
 Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
o Homosexuality in the US
 Mattachine Society
 Stonewall Inn Riots - 1969
Aftermath of 1960s Counter Culture
o Students for a Democratic Society
o “Weathermen”
o Drug Addiction
o Three Ps
 Population
 Protest
 Prosperity