SOURCE: Jamison, Andrew and Ron Eyerman. “The Reconceptualization of Culture: Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Mary McCarthy.” In Seeds of the Sixties. pp. 141-77. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

In the following excerpt, Jamison and Eyerman regard the role of radical politics on the work of Ginsberg, James Baldwin, and Mary McCarthy and deem the three authors “central actors in the reconceptualization of American culture that was taking place in the postwar period and, more important, in planting seeds that would sprout in the 1960s.”

On a cold day in early spring 1943, Irwin Allen Ginsberg, the son of Russian immigrants who had settled in Paterson, stood on a New Jersey dock awaiting the ferry to New York. Not yet seventeen, he was on his way to take the entry examination at Columbia University. In a rush of youthful emotion, he solemnly vowed to himself that if accepted to that...