Dan Wakefield

Ginsberg and the beatniks can be associated chronologically with the aggressively activist sociology of C. Wright Mills—let us say with the publication of Mills’ Causes of World War III (1957), which is about the point at which Mills’ writing turned from scholarship to first-class pamphleteering. Mills was by no means the first postwar figure who sought to tell it like it is about the state of American public life and culture. . . . But it was Mills who caught on. His tone was more blatant; his rhetoric, catchier. He was the successful academic who suddenly began to cry for action in a lethargic profession, in a lethargic society. . . .

In which a noted journalist and contributing editor of the Atlantic confesses the gory, personal details of writing, (and not writing) his first novel. The novel itself, Going All the Way, has just been published by Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte Press, and is an August selection of the Literary Guild.