The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

by Roger Kimball

In The Long March, Roger Kimball shows how the "cultural revolution" of the 1960s and '70s took hold in America, lodging in our hearts and minds, and in our innermost assumptions about what counts as the good life.

       Kimball believes that the counterculture transformed high culture as well as our everyday life in terms of attitudes toward self and country, sex and drugs, and manners and morality. Believing that this dramatic change "cannot be understood apart from the seductive personalities who articulated its goals," he intersperses his argument with incisive portraits of the life and thought of Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, Susan Sontag, Eldridge Cleaver and other "cultural revolutionaries" who made their mark.

       For all that has been written about the counterculture, until now there has not been a chronicle of how this revolutionary movement succeeded and how its ideas helped provoke today's "culture wars." The Long March fills this gap with a compelling and well-informed narrative that is sure to provoke discussion and debate.

Roger Kimball is the author of Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education. He is also co-editor with Hilton Kramer of Against the Grain: The New Criterion on Art and Intellect at the End of the Twentieth Century. His essays have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Times Book Review. He is the publisher of Encounter Books and the co-editor and publisher of The New Criterion. He lives in the New York City metropolitan area.