Books & Literature
The decade opened with the appearance of the first inexpensive paperback. Book clubs proliferated, and book sales went from one million to over twelve million volumes a year. Many important literary works were conceived during, or based on, this time period, but published later. Thus, it took a while for the horror of war and the atrocities of prejudice to come forth. Shirley Jackson wrote The Lottery to demonstrate how perpectly normal, otherwise nice people, could allow something like the Holocaust. In The Human Comedy, William Saroyan tackles questions of prejudice against the setting of World War II. Richard Wright completed Native Son in 1940 and Black Boy in 1945, earning acclaim, but government persecution over his communist affiliation sent him to Paris in 1945. Nonfiction writing proliferated, giving first-hand accounts of the war. The first edition of Dr. Benjamin Spock's Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care is considered by some to have changed child rearing.

Art
As Adolf Hitler systematically eliminated artists whose ideals didn't agree with his own, many emigrated to the United States, where they had a profound effect on American artists. The center of the western art world shifted from Paris to New York. To show the raw emotions, art became more abstract. Abstract Expressionism, also known as the New York School, was chaotic and shocking in an attempt to maintain humanity in the face of insanity. Jackson Pollock was the leading force in abstract expressionism, but many others were also influential, including Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Motherwell, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline, Piet Mondrian, Arshile Gorly, Adolf Gottlieb, and Hans Hofmann. Andrew Wyeth, the most popular of American artists, didn't fit in any movement. His most popular work, Christina's World was painted in 1948. Sculpture, too, bacame abstract and primitive, utilizing motion in Alexander Calder's mobiles, and modern materials such as steel and "found objects" rather than the traditional marble and bronze.

Art & Architecture
There was a fresh artistic outlook after World War II ended and the artistic world reflected this outlook. Abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock , Barnett Newman , Willem de Kooning , Clyfford Still and Franz Kline received official recognition at the New York Museum of Modern Art . These artists, referred to as the New York School, were generally experimental. Other abstract artists rebelled against the self-absorption of the New York School and delved into existentialism. Mark Rothko used large scale color blocks to create an overpowering material presence. Painters like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns , also abstract artists, did not want the viewer to rely on what he saw to interpret a painting.

Part of the 1950's boom in consumerisn included housing. People could afford single family dwellings and suburbia was born. A small suburban community called Levittown was built by William Levitt for returning servicemen and their families. An influence of Frank Lloyd Wright is seen in the popular Ranch style house . Designers like Bauhaus , who helped create the International style , influenced Ludwig Mies van der Rohe , Philip Johnson , Charles and Ray Eames and Eero Saarinen . Louis Kahn, the Guggenheim Museum , was a noted architect during this period.

Books & Literture
America had just begun her recovery from World War II, when suddenly the Korean Conflict developed. The USSR became a major enemy in the Cold War. Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed to know that Communists had infiltrated the United States government at the highest levels. Americans were feeling a sense of national anxiety. Was America the greatest country in the world? Was life in America the best it had ever been? As the decade passed, literature reflected the conflict of self-satisfaction with 50's Happy Days and cultural self-doubt about conformity and the true worth of American values.

Authors like Norman Vincent Peale , The Power of Positive Thinking , or Bishop Fulton J. Sheen -Life is Worth Living, indicate power of the individual to control his or her fate. The concern with conformity is reflected in David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, John Kenneth Galbraith -The Affluent Society, William H. Whyte's The Organization Man , Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged , and Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. A new group of authors appeared on the scene in the form of the Beats , or the beat generation or some called them beatniks. Best known of these are Jack Kerouac - Kerouac's works - On the Road, Dharma Bums, The Town and The City, Mexico City Blues (Poetry), Lawrence Ferlinghetti A Coney Island of the Mind , Pictures of a Gone World, and Allen Ginsberg Howl (Poetry). Gregory Corso , Neal Cassady , Michael McClure , Gary Snyder, William S. Burroughs were other beat authors giving voice to the anti-establishment movement.

Science Fiction became more popular with the actual possibility of space travel, Ray Bradbury wrote The Martian Chronicles . Isaac Asimov , wrote I, Robot , and other books about worlds to be discovered. . Established authors continuing to write included Tennessee Williams -The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, Robert Penn Warren -World Enough and Time, Carl Sandberg-Complete Poems, Herman Wouk -The Caine Mutiny, J. D. Salinger- The Catcher in the Rye , Truman Capote -The Grass Harp, John Steinbeck - East of Eden, Edna Ferber -Giant, James Michener -The Bridges of Toko Ri, Hawaii, Thomas Costain-The Silver Chalice, Eudora Welty -The Ponder Heart, William Faulkner -The Town.

Education
During the fifties, American education underwent dramatic and, for some, world shattering changes. Until 1954, an official policy of " separate but equal " educational opportunities for blacks had been determined to be the correct method to insure that all children in America received an adequate and equal education in the public schools of the nation. In 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren and other members of the Supreme Court wrote in Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas that separate facilities for blacks did not make those facilities equal according to the Constitution. Integration was begun across the nation. In 1956, Autherine J. Lucy successfully enrolled in the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. In 1957, Elizabeth Eckford was the first black teenager to enter then all-white Little Rock Central High School ,Little Rock, Arkansas. Although integration took place quietly in most towns, the conflict at Central High School in Little Rock was the first of many confrontations in Arkansas which showed that public opinion on this issue was divided.

Another crisis in education was uncovered by critics like Rudolph Flesch in his book Why Johnny Can't Read , who claimed that the American educational system was not doing its job. Other voices in the movement to revamp American schools were Arthur Bestor - Educational Wastelands, Albert Lynd - Quackery in the Public Schools, Robert Hutchins - The Conflict in Education, Admiral Hyman Rickover - Education and Freedom, and Max Rafferty - Suffer Little Children and What They Are Doing to Your Children.

Architecture
Architecture in the sixties was undergoing a refinement of Modernism and a move to an even more streamlined contemporary look. Tall buildings or skyscrapers created a distinctly American structural type. Architects such as Philip Johnson, and John Burgee, of Johnson & Burgee (Kline Biological Tower), are some of the architects who designed office buildings which helped create a different look for the skylines of large cities. Architects used light and space, for example the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library by I.M. Pei , to create buildings which were adapted for the activities which took place in them. The influence of space and futurisic design was apparent in some public builidings like the NASA complex at Houston, Texas . Eero Saarinen created the Memorial Arch in St. Louis, Missouri in 1965. Walter Gropius designed the Pan Am Building in 1963 with Pietro Belluschi and Emery Rothe & Sons. Louis I. Kahn in his Kimbell Art Museum of Ft. Worth and other buildings brought a feeling of austerity to American architecture. Robert Venturi wrote Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in 1966 and called for a change in the reductive simplicity of Modernism, beginning a protest in the late 60's. Perhaps one of the most well known and influential achitects whose career began to rise in the sixties is I. M. Pei . Peter Eisenman and Frank O. Gehry are architects who have become world famous for their distinctive designs and who began making names for themselves during this time.

Art
As in the fifties, art in America of the sixties was influenced by the desire to move into the modern age or future which the space age seemed to forecast. Major works by Alexander Calder (mobiles and sculpture) or Helen Frankenthaler (non-representational art) showed a desire to escape from details to interpret. Artists wanted to inspire the viewer to leap into the unknown and experience art in their own way. A new artist who appeared was Andy Warhol, a leading name in pop art. Other forms evolving during this time were assemblage art, op art (or optical art) (ex. Vasarely ), or kinetic abstraction (ex. Marcel Duchamp ), environmental art (ex. Robert Smithson ), and pop art , (ex. David Hockney ).

Books & Literature
Literature also reflected what was happening in the political arenas and social issues of America in the sixties. A book which described some of the turmoil of race relations as they affected people in America, Harper Lee's Pulitzer prize winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird is a story about a small southern town and social distinctions between races. Writing about race and gender, women of color like Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou and Margaret Walker Alexander helped create new insights on feminism as it developed in America. Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar), and Mary McCarthy (The Group) spoke of women in roles outside those of the happy wife and mother of the fifties. Women like Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique , and Gloria Steinem , led the way for many women. Disillusionment with the system was the theme of books like Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Marshall McLuhan, author of books on communications and the scope of the "global village," popularized his belief that mass communications were a driving force in the development of modern society in works like The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media . The Peter Principle, by Laurence Peter, came to epitomize incompetence. In 1963, Maurice Sendak published Where the Wild Things Are , about a boy named Max who must face some of his childhood fears. This controversial book with its illustrations, also by Sendak, won the Caldecott Medal in 1964 and has become a classic in children's literature.

Books That Define the Time :
• The Silent Spring - Rachel Carson
• The Games People Play - Eric Berne
• Valley of the Dolls - Jacqueline Susann
• In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
• The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan
• Unsafe at any Speed - Ralph Nader
• Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test - Tom Wolfe

Art & Architecture:
Seventies art reflected a slowing and refinement of some of the avant-garde trends prominent in the Sixties. Earth art, a movement that combined environmental and minimalist ideas on a large scale, was promoted by artists such as Michael Heizer, Walter de Maria, Robert Smithson, James Turrel, Alice Aycock, Claes Oldenburg, and Richard Serra. Massive earthworks such as Smithson's Spiral Jetty, challenged all the rules regarding mass, time, size, and space. Land art and environmental art, variations of earth art, were also prominent. Other notable schools of art were illusionism, which sought to surprise viewers and cause them to question their interpretation of reality, and photorealism and hiperrealism, which imitated photography, created by such artists as Richard Estes. Pop Art was still represented by artists such as Andy Warhol and David Hockney; and George Segal continued to sculpt his white plaster, Three Figures on Four Benches (1979). The influence of the women's movement was represented by Lynda Benglis, Jackie Winsor, and Judy Chicago, who created the feminist art exhibition, The Dinner Party. Performance art challenged the traditional, stationary aspect of art. Andrew Wyeth began painting his Helga pictures.

In architecture, the "modern movement" retreated and there was a gradual move toward architectural humanism and a renewed respect for traditional and historical design. Increasingly architects attempted to consider the needs and feelings of the people who would use their buildings. The historical element is evident in the pyramid form of San Francisco's Transamerica Building (William L. Pereira, 1972) and the classical Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans (Charles Moore, 1979). Houston's Pennzoil Place (Philip Johnson and John Burgee, 1976) combined modernism with humanism utilizing an eight-story atrium to connect two trapezoid-shaped towers. Other noteworthy structures of the decade include:

Kimball Art Museum, Fort Worth, Louis I. Kahn (completed 1972)
Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Gunnar Birkerts (1972)
Sears Tower, Chicago, Bruce Graham (1974)
National Air & Space Museum, Washington, D.C. (1976),
I. M. Pei's East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. (1974 to 1978).

Books & Literature
Many of the books published in the 70's revolved around a general theme of man's alienation from his spiritual roots. John Updike portrayed characters trying to find meaning in a society spiritually empty and in a state of moral decay. Joyce Carol Oates wrote of the search for a spiritual meaning in the contemporary world, and Kurt Vonnegut explored the lonliness of contemporary society and the power hungry materialism that pervaded it. One of the strongest literary voices to emerge from this decade was Toni Morrison , who examined the Black American experience as never before. The poetry of Rod McKuen was immensely popular. No playwright dominated this decade of both social and artistic unrest. Among the most acknowledged were Sam Shepherd, Lanford Wilson, David Mamet, Christopher Durang, and Neil Simon.