During the 1960s New Left radicalism in the United States failed, and social change, particularly pertaining to race, was only partial and incomplete, but the nation did undergo a cultural revolution. Both George Cotkin and Betty Luther Hillman explore the emergence of this new culture. In Feast of Excess, Cotkin brilliantly analyzes the radical cultural change that took place before, during, and after the 1960s. He calls the years when transformation took place the New Sensibility, which he dates from 1952 to 1974. Cotkin borrows the term New Sensibility from the critic Susan Sontag, who wrote a key essay with that title in 1964. The sixties neither began in 1960 nor ended in 1969. Many scholars have discussed the long sixties, because so much action took place outside the 1960s. Cotkin rejects both the phrase “the long sixties” and the emphasis upon the 1960s because cultural change started before 1960 and lasted past 1969. He also believes that calling the period the sixties exaggerates the role of the baby boomers who came of age at that time and the youth culture that they created.

The strategy for Cotkin's panoramic book is shrewd and effective. Culture is a large concept, and Cotkin has to be selective. He concentrates on music, art, and literature, with the greatest emphasis placed upon writers. The strategy is to examine a single major revolutionary work produced each year from 1952 to 1974. Each item and its creator are discussed in a short chapter supported by extensive notes. The book traces the overall shift of American culture across a generation. In the early 1950s, cultural orthodoxy was rooted in stodgy traditional middle-class values backed by censorship along with the formalist high-culture modern movement of the 1920s. By the mid-1970s, culture had been radically transformed. It was now rooted in the traits established by the New Sensibility, although culture had not yet become postmodern. The New Sensibility, therefore, occupies the space between the modern and the postmodern.

Cotkin sees the New Sensibility unfolding in three distinct phases, with the introductory phase lasting from 1952 to 1960. The shift began in 1952, when the avant-garde composer John Cage produced his silent musical piece that ran for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. From 1952 through 1960, radical cultural producers challenged orthodoxy, often provoking nasty and expensive battles, including censorship cases. During those years, practitioners of the New Sensibility seemed insecure, pressed against limits, and stressed experimentation. Certain traits expressed the New Sensibility. One was extremism, as evidenced by Cage's minimalist music or by Robert Rauschenberg's junk art. Another trait was the tendency toward performance, which often broke the barrier between artist and audience. This characteristic appeared in Marlon Brando's role as a biker in The Wild One (1954) and in 1955 in Allen Ginsberg's public reading of “Howl” in San Francisco. Ginsberg's enthusiasm for homosexuality broke another taboo, which had prohibited unrestrained discussion of sexuality. Jerry Lee Lewis's “Great Balls of Fire” (1957) also exploded sexually.

Patricia Highsmith in her Tom Ripley novels created the amoral hero, which shattered reader expectations. The questioning of moral principle could also be seen in Brando's roles. In The Americans (1958), the photographer Robert Frank, a Jewish refugee, portrayed ordinary people without comment. The refusal to embrace narrative or offer explanation was another trait of the New Sensibility, which depended upon the cultural consumer to impart meaning. Frank's photos also showed compassion for African Americans. Concern about minorities, the mentally ill, and the inarticulate were other aspects of the New Sensibility. Julian Beck and Judith Malina's Living Theatre explored all of these themes in avant-garde plays in New York throughout the 1950s. They used improvisation, encouraged audience participation, and focussed on social outcasts. The Connection (1959) used junkies as actors and jazz musicians in the performances. The New Sensibility also meant heavy drinking and taking drugs. Chemicals were supposed to create edginess that produced great art. Jack Gelber, the jazz musician who provided music for The Connection, used drugs heavily. So did Allen Ginsberg. In 1960 Norman Mailer, who had adopted the New Sensibility to become a white hipster, stabbed his wife. Both were drunk. Violence, seen as an essential part of artistic experience, was another characteristic of the New Sensibility.

From 1961 to 1968, the New Sensibility overwhelmed mainstream culture. The decline of censorship played an important role, and so did racial rage, exploding teenage boomer hormones, and fury against the escalating Vietnam War. The birth-control pill and rising feminism mattered, too. Lenny Bruce blamed the Holocaust on German sexual repression, and in 1961 he took his challenging, offensive performances loaded with four-letter words out of small private clubs and into mainstream settings. Harassed by law enforcement, he had been driven from the stage by the time he died of a heroin overdose in 1966. Meanwhile, James Brown's musical shows brought the new style to African American popular entertainment and signaled that the New Sensibility would merge high and low culture. In 1963, Andy Warhol affirmed that point with pop art. While the art's accessibility made it suspect to many critics, galleries tallied high sales and staged more exhibits. The New Sensibility celebrated the ordinary and embraced excess.

In 1965, John Coltrane played experimental jazz so loud and disharmonious that even his band members gave up trying to find any meaning. Coltrane expressed rising black rage. That same year Bob Dylan dropped political folk songs for amplification and rock music. Dylan expressed sympathy for outcasts, refused to explain enigmatic lyrics, and reveled in performances that challenged middle-class stereotypes, as rock always did. He drank a lot, too, and dropped lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). Anne Sexton, caught up in the feminist revolution as well as in her own depression, published a book of highly personal poems, Live or Die (1966), which won the Pulitzer Prize. The confessional mode marked another characteristic of the New Sensibility. A heavy user of alcohol and drugs, she committed suicide in 1974. William Styron, a white southern novelist, dared to get inside the head of Nat Turner, who had led a slave revolt, in The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). Savaged by black nationalists, Styron defended his art. In the New Sensibility, fiction mingled with historical fact, and the author could intrude at will into the manuscript. A year later, Gore Vidal's steamy transvestite novel Myra Breckinridge proved that censorship was dead.

In the third phase, from 1969 to 1974, Cotkin shows that the New Sensibility became normal within American culture. The black poet and playwright Amiri Baraka, formerly LeRoi Jones, forsook beatnik roots to embrace black nationalism. Showing empathy for outcasts, Diane Arbus photographed freaks and sometimes slept with her subjects. She committed suicide in 1971. Excessive sex and drugs proved toxic. Hunter S. Thompson downed alcohol and drugs when he covered Las Vegas, the place touted as the site of the new American Dream. He, too, eventually killed himself. Excess, including excessive sexual fantasy, was the main theme in the work of Samuel R. Delany, Thomas Pynchon, and Erica Jong. Cotkin's book ends with Chris Burden, a performance artist who stuffed himself into a storage locker, was nailed to the top of his VW bug, and had himself shot in the arm. These experiences enabled him to gain fame as an artist. Cotkin's fine book defines the cultural revolution that occurred between the waning of the formal, stilted modern in the 1950s and the hedonistic solipsism of the postmodern 1980s.

In Dressing for the Culture Wars, Betty Luther Hillman considers one key dimension of the cultural revolution. She explores how styles of attire and hair made politicized statements of self-presentation during the radical-hippie-black-power upsurge during the 1960s. Originally a counterculture attack against standardized mainstream white middle-class modes of grooming and dress, male long hair and beards, female miniskirts, and Afro hairdos so antagonized the establishment that these forms of self-fashion became recognized by practitioners, by the mainstream, and by media critics as political statements.

Luther Hillman covers this material in six deft chapters. She begins with the arrival of the Beatles in the United States in 1964 with moppet haircuts that were far longer than hair then worn by any American male. Within a short period, young men imitated the Fab Four, especially because the quartet was so beloved by America's young women. Schools, however, enforced rules against long-haired male students. The big change in attire took place when black power advocates used dashikis, Afro hair, and style to assert a separate political identity. While early 1960s white radicals had copied the respectable look of the civil rights movement, later 1960s radicals demonstrated difference through bodily display. In the late 1960s, radicals and hippies declared war against middle-class values by dressing and acting outrageously. Male long hair and wild hippie garb challenged conformity, materialism, and capitalism. Opponents saw sexual hedonism, the mocking of respectability, and threats to gender identity.

For young women, as Luther Hillman observes, the miniskirt posed both an opportunity and a problem. While women liked the fact that they could flaunt their bodies, short skirts also brought unwanted attention. Sexual liberation, it turned out, posed its own problems. Feminists turned against the miniskirt because they saw it as a fashion industry invention that led to female exploitation. If women wanted to have rights, then they needed to project a more sober image by wearing pantsuits. There was a gradual shift from skirts to pants. One could go further. Short hair, T-shirts, jeans, and boots evoked a masculine look, and in a world where men wielded most power, dressing in a masculine way asserted a right to power. Other feminists, however, argued that dressing in this way made women look like they wanted to be men. In the 1970s women opted to dress as they saw fit.

The most original chapter is on gay and lesbian self-presentation. Some gay men asserted a right to dress in a camp style in public settings. While dressing up in women's clothes had long been a staple of private gay parties, it was new to flaunt such an idea in public. Gay rights groups in the 1950s and early 1960s often had dress codes. By the late 1960s, however, a more radical gay movement purposely dressed in ways that jarred the middle class. Cross-dressing was one possibility. So was a certain effeminate style that presented homosexuals as unusually sensitive. The new man was supposed to be unlike the martial man of the Vietnam War. By the 1970s, homosexuals were less likely to show off the camp style in public, except for gay rights parades; transgender people were conceded to be part of the gay movement; and a new style among gay men stressed bodybuilding, tight jeans, and boots. The macho look suggested that homosexuals had found a new identity apart from the flower child ideal of the 1960s. Lesbians appeared to have fewer problems finding either an identity or clothing, perhaps because lesbians shared many of the concerns of straight feminists.

Luther Hillman then considers the rise of unisex clothing in the 1970s. The popularity of the new styles, however, eliminated political meaning. As the political meaning declined, styles became less controversial. The last chapter looks at court cases concerning dress and hair in employment. Most of the cases concern males fired for having long hair in the early 1970s. Courts split over whether an employer had to accommodate an employee's desire to have long hair. By the mid-1970s, when Nixon appointees became numerous, judges were more sympathetic to employers. While employers were given great latitude in imposing dress codes that made gender distinctions, businesses also found it necessary to accept male long hair and beards and female pants in order to hold key employees. In the long run, individual choice predominated. Luther Hillman's excellent monograph shows how hair and attire became politically controversial during the cultural revolution of the 1960s.