What It Felt Like; Living in the American Century
New York: Pantheon Books, 2000. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. x, 159, [7] pages. Illustrations. Inscribed by the author on the title page. DJ has slight wear and soiling. Henry Southworth Allen (b. 1941 in Summit, New Jersey) is an American journalist, poet, artist, and critic. Allen obtained his degree in English and art at Hamilton College and Montgomery College. Allen began his painting and drawing in the late 1960s. He was a stationed in Vietnam in the mid-1960s as a marine. Allen was a critic for The New York Review of Books and worked on staff for the New Haven Register. As a staff writer for the Style section, he worked at The Washington Post for 39 years. In 1975, he was awarded a NEH Journalism Fellowship at the University of Michigan. He left the Washington Post in 2009 after an altercation with a fellow staffer. He then began teaching courses in cultural analysis in the University of Maryland honors program. Allen had solo shows in June 2009 at Strathmore Hall and in August 2012 at the Chebeague Island Library. Allen was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2000 for his writings in the Washington Post on photography. This treasure of a book gives us a vivid and captivating evocation of the social, cultural, and spiritual tenor of the twentieth century, decade by remarkable decade. Henry Allen--veteran feature writer and editor at the Washington Post--reminds us of just how it was: "the champagne disenchantment of the tuxedo twenties. Husbands who lost Depression jobs and hid in their houses for shame, the October morning energy of the postwar forties, the dusty heat of fifties television sets, the smell of Vitalis on men's hair, women in gloves that felt sexy touching your skin, men who whistled and wore hats tipped to one side, the barefoot LSD weddings when the universe seemed a conspiracy in everyone's favor. . . . " Each of these ten chapters is a virtual time capsule written with keen intelligence, feeling, and an uncanny sense of the essential experiences of the era: the unexpected, idiosyncratic sights, sounds, occasions, and events that defined not just the time but the way we remember it. This is a book of myriad pleasures--a reminder, as we plunge headlong into the future, of the richness and importance of our past. Condition: Very good / very good.
Keywords: Twentieth Century, Great Depression, Second World War, LSD, Social Change, History, Essays, Vietnam War, Culture Change
ISBN: 0375420630
[Book #73011]
Price: $45.00