The sixties were the age of youth, as 70 million children from the post-war baby boom became teenagers and young adults.  The movement away from the conservative fifties continued and eventually resulted in revolutionary ways of thinking and real change in the cultural fabric of American life.  No longer content to be images of the generation ahead of them, young people wanted change. The changes affected education, values, lifestyles, laws, and entertainment.  Many of the revolutionary ideas which began in the sixties are continuing to evolve today.

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The purpose of this web and library guide is to help the user gain a broad understanding and appreciation for the culture and history of the 1960s.   In a very small way, this is a bibliographic essay.  While there is no way we can link to everything, we have attempted to find areas of special interest and to select information that we hold dear today - movies we watch, songs we sing, events that move us, people we admire.

ART   As in the fifties, art in America of the sixties was influenced by the desire to move into the modern age or future which the space age seemed to forecast.  Major works by  Alexander Calder  (mobiles and sculpture) or Helen Frankenthaler  (non-representational art) showed a desire to escape from  details to interpret.  Artists wanted to inspire the viewer to leap into the unknown and experience art in their own way. A new artist who appeared was  Andy Warhol, a leading name in pop art.  Other forms evolving during this time were  assemblage art,  op art (or optical art) (ex. Vasarely ), or kinetic abstraction  (ex.  Marcel Duchamp ), environmental art   (ex. Robert Smithson ), and  pop art , (ex. David Hockney ).


Literature also reflected what was happening in the political arenas and social issues of America in the sixties. A book which described some of the turmoil of race relations as they affected people in America,  Harper Lee's Pulitzer prize winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird is a story about a small southern town and social distinctions between races.  Writing about race and gender, women of color like Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou  and Margaret Walker Alexander helped create new insights on feminism as it developed in America. Sylvia Plath   (The Bell Jar), and Mary McCarthy  (The Group) spoke of women in roles outside those of the happy wife and mother of the fifties.  Women like Betty Friedan, author of  The Feminine Mystique , and Gloria Steinem , led the way for many women.  Disillusionment with the system was the theme of books like Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Marshall McLuhan, author of books on communications and the scope of the "global village," popularized his belief that mass communications were a driving force in the development of modern society in works like The Gutenberg Galaxy  and  Understanding Media .  The Peter Principle, by Laurence Peter, came to epitomize incompetence. In 1963, Maurice Sendak  published Where the Wild Things Are, about a boy named Max who must face some of his childhood fears.  This controversial book with its illustrations, also by  Sendak, won the Caldecott Medal in 1964 and has become a classic in children's literature.