Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll

Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n Roll: The American Counterculture of the 1960s offers a unique examination of the cultural flowering that enveloped the United States during that early postwar decade. Robert C. Cottrell provides an enthralling view of the counterculture, beginning with an examination of American bohemia, the Lyrical Left of the pre-WWII era, and the hipsters. He delves into the Beats, before analyzing the counterculture that emerged on both the East and West coasts, but soon cropped up in the American heartland as well. Cottrell delivers something of a collective biography, through an exploration of the antics of seminal countercultural figures Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, and Ken Kesey. Cottrell also presents fascinating chapters covering "the magic elixir of sex," rock 'n roll, the underground press, Haight-Ashbury, the literature that garnered the attention of many in the counterculture, Monterey Pop, the Summer of Love, the Death of Hippie, the March on the Pentagon, communes, Yippies, Weatherman, Woodstock, the Manson family, the women's movement, and the decade's legacies.

Robert C. Cottrell was a longtime professor of history and American studies at California State University, Chico. He taught a course for many years on American Popular Culture and offered seminars on baseball and American culture. He is the author of The Best Pitcher in Baseball: The Life of Rube Foster, Negro League Giant; Blackball, the Black Sox, and the Babe: Baseball's Crucial 1920 Season; Two Pioneers: How Hank Greenberg and Jackie Robinson Transformed Baseball--and America; and The Year Without a World Series: Major League Baseball and the Road to the 1994 Players' Strike. He lives in California.

Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: The Precursors: From Utopia to Huxley
Chapter 2: Troubadours for a New American Bohemia: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and the Beats
Chapter 3: The Continued Reception of the Beats
Chapter 4: From Harvard to Millbrook: Timothy Leary
Chapter 5: The Merry Prankster: Ken Kesey
Chapter 6: The Magic Elixir of Sex and a Touch of Anarchism
Chapter 7: The Magic in the Music
Chapter 8: California Dreaming and Haight-Ashbury
Chapter 9: Spreading the Word: Alternative Media
Chapter 10: People of the Book
Chapter 11: From the Human Be-In to the Summer of Love
Chapter 12: The Death of Hippie and Early Postmortems
Chapter 13: Alternative Living
Chapter 14: From Hippie to Yippie on the Way to Revolution
Chapter 15: Fighting in the Streets and the Latest Battle of the Bands
Chapter 16: COINTELPRO and the Millennium
Chapter 17: The Conspiracy, Street Fighting Man, and the Apocalypse
Chapter 18: The Not So Slow Fade
Chapter 19:It's All Over Now
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author