The Sixties: A Forged Diary

by John Crowley

Genres: Nonfiction

81 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2024

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

John Crowley (1942-2026) was an American author of fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, and non-fiction. Crowley studied at Indiana University and has a second career as a documentary film writer.

Crowley is best known as the author of Little, Big (1981), a work which received World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and has been called "a neglected masterpiece" by Harold Bloom, and his Ægypt series of novels which revolve around the same themes of Hermeticism, memory, families and religion. His novel Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr (2017) won the Mythopoeic Award in 2018 and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, while critics compared it in scope and ambition to Crowley's earlier works Little, Big and the Aegypt cycle.

Note: The John Crowley who wrote Sans épines, la rose: Tony Blair, un modèle pour l'Europe? is a different author with the same name. (website)

Reviews

[Alex Sarll]

Inspired by reading Edmund Wilson's 1920s diaries during lockdown, Crowley set out to retrospectively create his own diaries from another better decade, right down to also taking on the role of Wilson's editor and annotating himself, sometimes sceptically, in italics. The sixties and the changes they wrought - or failed to - suffuse my favourite Crowley, the Aegypt quartet, and reading this I got a fuller sense of why; unlike the many who nominally lived through these years but were stranded in places where they wouldn't get a whiff of 'the sixties' until years later, and by then in dilute form, Crowley was in New York, and working for a time as a photographer, meaning encounters with musicians, models, the Warhol set, as well as dope and marches... all the boxes on the decade's checklist, really. Hindsight obviously helps, but you can see the times changing around him; his girlfriend applies for a job at the UN, is worried living in sin might count against her; not only does she get the gig, but when she needs a pre-legalisation abortion, her boss is the one who knows where to send her. This is the third volume I've read of the Conway Miscellany, and while the dream journal and the writing talks were fine, they were very much inessential Crowley. This, though, this has the magic I expect from him, even if - much like the sixties - I'm not sure it sticks the landing.