Biopsy: Biography

Abstract

Helen S. Garson. Truman Capote. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1980.210 pp. Mark Harris. Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980. 184 pp. Sheldon J. Hershinow. Bernard Malamud. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1980.165 pp. Jerome Klinkowitz. The American 1960s: Imaginative Acts in a Decade of Change. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1980. 119 + x pp. Suzanne Henning Uphaus. John Updike. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1980.149 pp. Ronald Weber. The Literature of Fact: Literary Nonfiction in American Writing. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980. 181 pp. The Sixties. The phrase, not to mention the period, has already acquired talismanic properties. It is enough to say "the Sixties" as one says "the Twenties'" or "the Nineties'1 for a certain set of attitudes and events to be conjured up. With all the reverence of Shreve McCannon begging Quentin Compson to tell him about the South, a good many students demand of apparent Sixties' survivors an account of those halcyon days when, rumor has it, students were a force to be reckoned with. What with the installation of the "new conservatism" regarded as a "fait accompli," thankfully by the Moral Majority and many academics who yoke such profundities as "the Sixties are over" and "back to basics [sic]" the allure of defining the Sixties' sensibility has increased for would-be cultural sages. How tempting it is to try to bring into focus that "whole new sense of priorities and values," those "new cultural styles," the "new cultural model," the "sixties aesthetic." Jerome Klinkowitz has obviously succumbed to such aspirations, the phrases in the preceding sentence being his—readers who confront The American 1960s will wish he hadn't. This book will probably stand for some time to come as one of the most portentous, least incisive and least insightful attempts to articulate the Sixties' Zeitgeist.