Smiling through the Apocalypse;: Esquire's History of the Sixties

by Harold Hayes, Norman Mailer (Contributor), Tom Wolfe (Contributor)

"A Baedeker of our eight-lane freeway to hell, one of the most breath-stopping, side-splitting, murderously significant anthologies ever published." -The New York Times

Genres: Essays, Sociology, Literature, Journalism

1005 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1969

Reviews

[Pate McMichael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful, if poorly published, anthology of Esquire's literary journalism in the 1960s. It's massive and saturated with greatness. The classics are easy to spot, but I found many rarer gems that blew me away, particularly the story about George Plimpton and his friends in the literary scene. There's also a wonderful and shockingly candid profile of LBJ that makes the hairs on your neck stand up. Anyone who wants to read some great journalism from the greatest decade in our history, should pick this up from the library. Hard to find a new copy at a reasonable price.

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some great essays in here, but a lot of the stuff just doesn't hold up 40 years later.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some great essays and some not-so great, but overall a neat read on life in the United States in the 1960s