Introduction: The view from the end of the century -- Preface to the original edition -- I. Breaking out : new shoots from old roots -- Prologue: Allen Ginsberg and the sixties -- Cold War blues : politics and culture in the fifties -- The rise of a new sensibility, or, How the fifties broke up -- II. Breaking through : the hidden history of the sixties -- Black humor and history : the early sixties -- The working press, the literary culture, and the new journalism -- Black writing and Black nationalism : four generations -- The age of rock revisited -- III. Breaking down, or, How it all came out -- Fiction at the crossroads : dilemmas of experimental writer -- Epilogue: Remembering the sixties, surviving the seventies.
