Previous Convictions: A Journey Through the 1950s

Nora Sayre, author of Sixties Going on Seventies and a National Book Award nominee, continues to explore our century's history as she turns her witty, insightful eye on the dramas of the 1950s. The major figures of the Cold War landscape, such as J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy, are alive in these pages, but what makes Sayre's montage of narrative and documentary unique is her focus on the connections between private lives and public events. She follows some of the luminaries of the mid-century through the best and worst chapters of their lives. There are enthralling portraits of James Thurber, Walker Evans, John O'Hara, Edmund Wilson, and others. After a powerful postmortem on the jazz age generation, Sayre writes about her Harvard contemporaries who came of age in the 1950s, cautious rebels who didn't want to repeat their parents' turbulent history. Moving in and out of the narrative, she is sometimes a participant-as in her amusing memoir of the Poets' Theatre, which anticipated the counterculture to come-and sometimes a listener. Autherine Lucy, the first black student at the University of Alabama, is the subject of one of several illuminating "documentaries," as are the loyalty oath crisis at Berkeley and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee's assault on the New York Times. Shaped out of memories and innumerable interviews with those who were investigated, betrayed, and blacklisted, this exciting and highly original book provides fascinating new material on a period of intense fear and immense optimism, a time when Hollywood was called a hotbed of subversion, when American leftists did their best to endure in a treacherous climate. While Sayre explores the past, readers will notice parallels with the present. As she travels between the generations, her book will captivate those who remember the era and younger readers for whom the territory is new. In many ways, Previous Convictions tells the hidden history of our times.