Discover the Counterculture of the 1960s and 70s in this comprehensive exhibition at the Library, You Say You Want A Revolution: Remembering the 60s, open January 19 - September 1, 2018. Part of Carnegie Hall's citywide celebration of the 1960s, this exhibition explores the breadth and significance of this pivotal era—from communal living and forays into expanded consciousness to tensions around race, politics, sexuality, and the environment. Items on display, drawn exclusively from the Library's collections, include Timothy Leary's notes on acid trips, footage of the Woodstock music festival, and posters used in protest against the Vietnam War.

Curator Isaac Gewirtz shares a Counterculture reading list below. See also Counterculture Reading List for recommended reading. 

Influences on the Counterculture

Hermann Hesse. Siddhartha. Holland, Ohio: Dreamscape Media, [2016]. First English translation 1954.

Aldous Huxley. The Doors of Perception. New York: Harper and Row, 1964.

Jack Kerouac. On the Road. New York: Viking, 2008. Transcribed from the 1950 scroll.

Henry David Thoreau. Walden. Introduction and annotations by Bill McKibben. Boston: Beacon, [2017]. First published 1854.

Alan Watts. The Way of Zen. New York: Vintage Books, 1999. First published 1957.

Contemporary Accounts of the Counterculture

Stephen Diamond. What the Trees Said: Life on a New Age Farm. New York: Delta, 1971.

Wavy Gravy. The Hog Farm and Friends. New York: Links, 1974.

Lucy Horton. Country Commune Cooking. New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan, 1972.

Norman Mailer. The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. First published 1968.

Charles A. Reich. The Greening of America. New York: Bantam, 1995. First published 1970.

Ron E. Roberts. The New Communes: Coming Together in America. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971.

Hunter S. Thompson. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. New York: Modern Library, 1996. First published 1971.

Tom Wolfe. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Bantam, 1999. First published 1968.

Counterculture Fiction

Richard Brautigan. Trout Fishing in America. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. First published 1967.

Tom Robbins. Another Roadside Attraction. New York: Doubleday, 1971. 

Counterculture Poetry

Richard Brautigan. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. San Francisco: Communication Company, ca. 1967.

Counterculture Memoirs

Margot Adler. Heretic’s Heart: A Journey Through Spirit and Revolution. Boston: Beacon, 1997.

Peter Coyote. Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1998.

Robert Roskind. Memoirs of an Ex-Hippie: Seven Years in the Counterculture. Blowing Rock, N.C.: One Love Press, 2001.

About the Counterculture

David Allyn. Make Love Not War: The Sexual Revolution, an Unfettered History. Boston: Little Brown, 2000.

Nick Bromell. Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Chelsea Cain, ed. Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture. Seattle: Seal, 1999.

Alice Echols. Shaky Ground: The Sixties and Its Aftershocks. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Todd Gitlin. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. Toronto: New York: Bantam, 1987.

Roger Kimball. The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America. San Francisco: Encounter, 2000.

Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo. Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture. Lawrence, Kan.:  University Press of Kansas, 2009.

Timothy Miller. The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999.

John Anthony Moretta. The Hippies: A 1960s History. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Co., 2017.

Abe Peck. Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press. New York: Pantheon, 1985.

 

Exhibition Information

You Say You Want A Revolution: Remembering the 60s is open at the Library's Stephen A. Schwartzman Building from January 19 through September 1, 2018.