The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s

The period between the close of World War II and the American government's full-scale involvement in Vietnam was, we have long been told, a gray one in the annals of political dissent and liberalism. But Richard Pells shows that the times had more to them than a tired acceptance of things as they were. He examines intellectuals of the period--C. Wright Mills, Dwight MacDonald, Arthur Schlesinger, Daniel Boorstin, Hannah Arendt, Norman Mailer, Paul Goodman, and Edmund Wilson among them--who resisted the reigning conservatism through their writings in magazines like Dissent, The New Republic, and Partisan Review. These heroes fought among themselves so much that they could never constitute an organized political body, but they did keep things lively, even if conservative critics were readily able to steamroller them. This is solid social history that turns up several surprises.