Core Classics
Catcher in the Rye, On the Road, Howl,
Coney Island of the Mind, Whole Earth Catalog,
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Sigmund Freud, Will Durant and others have asserted that we can’t know who we are unless we understand where we have come from.

For the generation that came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s, writers and other celebrity wannabes used the media, including the publishing industry, to make themselves known.

Among the 50s kids bumping shoulders and rubbing against each other, many were book readers. Some say the baby boom generation was the last one to be significantly influenced by books.

This web site is devoted to compiling and reviewing the books embraced by the early baby boomers. Much of the publishing history is drawn from Philip D. Beidler’s Scriptures for a Generation: What We Were Reading in the 60s (Univ. of GA Press, 1994).

Looking back at the books influential to young people in the 60s and early 70s can be more than an exercise in nostalgia. Middle-aged baby boomers may understand better who they are today by understanding what they read 30 years ago. Ideas are powerful in the formation of character, particularly when taken to heart during adolescence.

In studying the publishing history described in these pages, I find remarkable the power of the media in shaping attitudes of young people. The written materials popular among today’s young people seem quite tame compared to writings I had easy access to in the sixties. My particular blindness when young was that I failed to see the commercial value of the ideas I read about--that mass market publishing was driven by sales figures rather than taste or quality--and that some ideas might be harmful to the young soul, as Socrates said of the sophists in Plato’s Protagoras:

He is like a hunter or fisherman, but he hunts man instead of animals, and takes money in exchange for the semblance of education he provides. He is a wandering merchant, much  like a seller of meat and drinks, except he sells food for the soul. . . .    Surely, . . . knowledge is food for the soul; and we must take care, my friend, that the Sophist does not deceive us when he praises what he sells, like dealers wholesale or retail who sell the food of the body; for they praise indiscriminately all their goods, without knowing what are really beneficial or hurtful.  

Seekers of Enlightenment Timothy Leary, Baba Ram Dass, Alan Watts, Carlos Castanada, Hermann Hesse

Budding Psychologists Rogers, Perls, Maslow, Laing, Berne

Budding Feminists
Second Sex, Feminine Mystique, Bell Jar, Sexual Politics, Sisterhood is Powerful, Female Eunuch, Our Bodies, Ourselves

Political Radicals

Ramparts, Autobiography of Malcolm X,
Soul on Ice, Do It, Student as Nigg*r,
Strawberry Statement

Back to the Earth

Rachel Carson, Stewart Brand, Mother Earth News

Budding Intellectuals

Marcuse, McLuhan, Keniston, Laing, Reich,
Roszak, Brown, Slater, Fuller

To an unformed mind, reading the books listed in this site when young would tend to create liberal political views. I'm reminded of a saying, sometimes attributed to Winston Churchill: "If you're not a liberal when you're young you're a coward. If you're not a conservative when you're old, you're a fool." Each of us boomers can assess her own changes in this regard. Another quote, from Robert Frost,  is relevant: "I was afraid to be a radical when young for fear I would be a conservative when old." Frost seems to be saying that those of us who are intense in our beliefs when young likely will remain intense when old.

I've remained a liberal, though I like to think of my liberalness as something broader than political stances. It's my lifelong pursuit of a liberal education through reading that is the source of my liberality. The "scriptures of my generation" influenced me profoundly, sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly, but the habit of reading finally is what led to a rewarding expansion of my vistas.