Out of the Sixties: Storytelling and the Vietnam Generation

In a highly original study, David Wyatt takes a broad, yet personal, look 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. The thread that ties the various genres and visions together and that which constitutes Wyatt's own critical aesthetic, is the centrality of the personal response and the seamlessness, therefore, of identity and history.

David Wyatt is a professor of English at the University of Maryland.