Out of the Sixties: Storytelling and the Vietnam Generation

Out of the Sixties explores the tension between history and the self in the work of ten authors who came of age in the 1960s. Each chapter deals with a representative figure - George Lucas, Bruce Springsteen, Ann Beattie, Alice Walker. Wyatt argues that for each figure the resolution between the personal and the political comes through storytelling, the act where convention and original gestures meet. Through a survey of a wide array of forms - movies, rock music, drama, poetry, short story, the novel, journalism - Out of the Sixties conveys the rich cultural achievement of the generation shaped by the trauma of Vietnam. For some, their work is marked by the war and concerned directly with it; to 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.