Out of the Sixties
Storytelling and the Vietnam Generation

This study looks at the cultural legacy of the sixties through ten creative figures who came of age during the Vietnam War.

David Wyatt (Author)

9780521446891, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 29 October 1993

244 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.349 kg

"...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

This study, first published in 1994, looks 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.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: the form of story
Part I. Nostalgia: 1. George Lucas
2. Bruce Springsteen
Part II. Celebrity: 3. Sam Shepard
4. Ann Beattie
Part III. Family Romance: 5. Sue Miller
6. Ethan Mordden
7. Alice Walker
Part IV. Survival: 8. Gregory Orr
9. Louise Glück
10. Michael Herr
Conclusion: people in history
Works read and cited
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]