THE LAST GREAT DREAM

Grateful Dead biographer McNally examines the origins of the hippie counterculture in the post–World War II era.

The epicenter of American bohemia has always been San Francisco, where in the late 1940s “a thread of artistic discourse focused on freedom coalesced into a subculture.” Though he disavowed the beatnik label that would come in the next decade, the center of this subculture was the poet Kenneth Rexroth, who, McNally holds, practiced an anarchism “in which the personal is political,” certainly a belief that would take root and then later flourish in the hippie and anti-war movements. (As McNally correctly notes, “hippie” is a media coinage: The hippies proudly called themselves “freaks.”) McNally takes his discussion to Los Angeles, never quite hip but “fertile ground for nonmainstream religious and occult thinking”; he extends it further to Greenwich Village, where a tougher-edged bohemian movement was rising. Well versed in the history of the era while not exactly breaking new ground, McNally locates some of the climacterics of the counterculture in works such as the abstract paintings of Clyfford Still, the satirical writings of Paul Krassner, and particularly Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, which “simultaneously foreshadowed and helped to propagate the values of the youth culture of the 1960s.” He might have done more to make that connection more explicit, but McNally ventures a number of useful observations, including the heavy-handedness of the police as a kind of spur for rebellion and the continuing influence of the 1960s in the first years of the computer revolution, suggesting that its birth in the San Francisco Bay Area was for good reason: “The atmosphere of the Haight and LSD imparted a vision of computers that served individuals.” He sounds a hopeful chord in the thought that while the dream of the ’60s may be dead, “the dreaming continues.”

An ambitious, highly capable work of cultural history.