The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties

Grateful Dead biographer McNally (A Long Strange Trip) offers a far-reaching, immersive history of the post-WWII countercultural movement. Beginning in the late 1940s, McNally traces how a “whirlpool of maverick poets” in San Francisco overlapped with art, theater, music, and activist scenes in Los Angeles, New York, and London. He hits on the era’s big names—Beats like Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, bands such as the Beatles and Jefferson Airplane—but gives equal attention to lesser-known artists who eschewed commercial success, among them Jay DeFeo, whose 1,850-lb. painting The Rose took a forklift to move, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe with its “politicized commedia dell’arte.” McNally tracks how police and local governments made a concerted effort to push back against the anti-establishment bohemians through frequent crackdowns on free speech, from high-profile censorship cases against Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Lenny Bruce’s comedy to less infamous incidents like the targeting of a gallerist who showed Ron Boise’s sculptures of “sexual positions from the Karma Sutra.” McNally concludes with several landmark moments in 1967 that made the “insights” of this “small group of avant-garde artists” suddenly “accessible”—among them the Human Be-In in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury—which hastened not only the mainstreaming but also the watering down of bohemianism into hippiedom. McNally masterfully combines many disparate lineages of political, social, art, and pop history into one singular, sweeping portrait. The result is a stunning vision of a broad and powerful idealism that gripped the world for more than two decades. (May)