It was the year of the microchip, the birth-control pill,
the space race, and the computer revolution; the rise of Pop
art, free jazz, "sick comics," the New Journalism, and indie
films; the emergence of Castro, Malcolm X, and personal
superpower diplomacy; the beginnings of Motown, Happenings,
and the Generation Gap-all bursting against the backdrop of
the Cold War, the fallout-shelter craze, and the first
American casualties of the war in Vietnam.
It was a year when the shockwaves of the new ripped the
seams of daily life, when humanity stepped into the cosmos
and commandeered the conception of human life, when the
world shrank but the knowledge needed to thrive in it
expanded exponentially, when outsiders became insiders, when
categories were blurred and taboos trampled, when we crossed
into a "new frontier" that offered the twin prospects of
infinite possibilities and instant annihilation-a frontier
that we continue to explore exactly fifty years later, at an
eerily similar turning point.
In 1959: The Year Everything Changed, acclaimed Slate
columnist Fred Kaplan vividly chronicles this vital,
overlooked year that set the world as we know it in motion.
Drawing on original research, including untapped archives
and interviews with major figures of the time, Kaplan pieces
together the vast, untold story of a civilization in
flux-and paints vivid portraits of the men and women whose
creative energies, ideas, and inventions paved the way for
the new era. They include:
Norman Mailer, musing on the hipster and the H-bomb while
fusing journalism and literature in wildly new, influential
ways; Lenny Bruce, remaking stand-up comedy by loosening the
language and skewering politics and religion; Miles Davis
and Ornette Coleman, shattering the structures of jazz; John
Cassavetes, making a new kind of movie, with improvised
dialogue, shot in the city streets, outside the Hollywood
system; Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown, insinuating
black urban music into mainstream pop culture; Barney
Rosset, the owner of Grove Press, suing the government's
censors and toppling obscenity laws; Malcolm X and Medgar
Evers, advancing new and militant paths to civil rights and
racial politics; Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and
Allan Kaprow, blurring the boundaries between art and life;
Jack Kilby, a self-described "tinkerer," inventing the
microchip, which triggers the digital age; Margaret Sanger,
a radical activist in her eighties, spurring renegade
scientists to invent a "magic pill" that lets women control
their reproductive processes and unleashes the sexual and
feminist revolutions; and John F. Kennedy, the coalescing
figure of the era, campaigning for president as a young
outsider, keen to grapple with the "unknown opportunities
and peril" of the coming "new frontier"—just as Barack
Obama, an even unlikelier outsider, confronts the eve of a
new decade in our own turbulent time.
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