Writer and activist Abbie Hoffman (1936-1989) was best known for his anti-war protests as a leader of the Youth International Party in the 1960s.

Abbie Hoffman was born November 30, 1936, in Worcester, Massachusetts, and educated at Brandeis University (B.A., 1959) and the University of California, Berkeley (M.A., 1960). Like so many other activists of the 1960s, Hoffman was radicalized by participating in the civil rights movement. Among other activities, he founded a store--Liberty House--to sell products manufactured by co-operatives of poor people in Mississippi. In mid-decade he turned his attention to the war in Vietnam, which heated up just when Black Power was driving whites out of black freedom organizations. Hoffman's unique contribution, with Jerry Rubin, was to unite political activism with the emergent counter-culture. As a rule the two movements were antithetical, politics drawing young men and women into public affairs, the counter-culture attracting others to the private...