What are some books that talk about what life was like in the 1950's to early 60's?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ND3oghPL5M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AK5jyVCdXwc
The only '50s/'60s-themed books I've read have satirized/criticized the culture of the time (White Noise, American Pastoral) rather than support it or present a romanticized vision of the time (though I would definitely be equally interested in reading something similar to your pic, OP).
>>7739975
Yeah, that's what I was afraid of. It seems like that sort of thing is a reaction to the era's presentation of itself in media. So we're just left with The Andy Griffith Show vs. Madmen as our only lenses with which to look back.
the era after it wanted to do nothing more than to poison the past; so hasty were they to cover their crime, so flushed with guilt, that they burned the library of alexandria almost completely to the ground, scattered the ashes, vowed never to speak of that time again
the 50s were, by and large, a happy, fruitful, peaceful, truly enlightened time. they represented the flowering of the dream of 2000 years of European civilization
however the greater the beauty, the more transient. no more ever again will it haunt our dreams; nobody believes in it anymore, it's the modern world's whipping goat. doesn't anybody notice that this conceals a terrifying anxiety—that our best days are already behind us, and that they died by our own hands?
I'd say some UFO diaries from the 50s and 60s give a taste of that time—but honestly, I'd recommend you just to turn back.
Too much reflection on that chapter of our past will make the present almost impossible to endure.
The last picture show.
>>7740294
Thanks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBdumT3Pieg
I'm pretty sure Lolita fits this category, but I might be a decade off
>>7739944
The outsiders
>>7740361
Do you have any realist literature, maybe? Like Dostoevsky for the 1950's/60's
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZV5tgZlTEkQ
Happy Days novelizations
>>7739944
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyxLaHmOaYM
heh nice to know people felt apathy and boredom 50 years ago.
RIP
>>7740282
>Too much reflection on that chapter of our past will make the present almost impossible to endure.
Come one. There's still hope. Don't give up, you foolish guac bowl merchant.
>>7739944
Lolita, I guess. It kinda oozes that 1950s teen life at times with Lolita's interest in boys, milkshakes and the glitz of movies (she's always reading movie magazines).
Portnoy's Complaint also.
The Bell Jar for what its worth.
>>7739944
What happened to this america anon, where the blowjobs were flowing and the milkshakes were blowing. Decent white teens being all kinds of cute and flirty.
Fucking mexicans and muslims. BUILD THE WALL VOTE TRUMP REEEEEEE
>>7739944
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac
I just want to kill myself when reading about life in the 50s and 60s so I don't do it.
>>7742358
Why? Do you have golden age delusions?
>>7742363
Yes, I have delusions of booming economies and countries without negroes and muzzies.
>>7742373
The fifties and the sixties were the times where the current situation was set up. Those post-war faggots are the ones responsibly for the neoliberal globalism you're suffering from today.
You shouldn't glorify the people who destroyed Western civilisation.
>>7742394
The 50s and 60s were the pinnacle of American culture as we know it. Would you honestly rather have the culture of insecurity and "detente" as we have now, or a time of prosperity and happiness?
This "glorification" of the '50s you're talking about is a way of disparaging hope.
>>7742363
Why is the world a better place today? Because we have superior technology?
>>7742423
Neither of you lived there and I highly doubt either of you are qualified historians who truly know what it was like. Both of you are looking at the era through the lens of whatever ideological leaning you want to view it as and see it as a flawless utopia or a backwards time of false optimism, and both of you are wrong.
>>7740282
>oppress people of color, LGBT and Jews to levels that we can't even comprehend today
>a happy, fruitful, peaceful, truly enlightened time. they represented the flowering of the dream of 2000 years of European civilization
I want /pol/ to leave
>>7742643
In all seriousness, the 50s were a time of artificial and unsustainable prosperity and optimism covering a potentially apocalyptic and certainly not-ideal expansion of the power of the military-industrial complex.
All those people who used to be struggling in the fields who could suddenly live in a new house, drive a new car and drink malts at the soda counter after football games? They were working in defense manufacturing industries that largely dried up towards the end of the cold war. Now we're paying for all the shit they built and experiencing a government where the companies that made them fat have power that would have been unheard of before the second world war.
>>7742423
The 50s and 60s are the roots of our current culture. It's where everything went wrong.
I'm writing a book in the 50s and there is a lot of information available online about the way people lived. I'm not sure what OP is looking for, because people throughout history will have different opinions on the way of life their civilization advocates. Once you understand the general attitude, you just have to understand the attitudes of your characters and they respond to the dominant culture. There was no point in history where everyone just completely agreed with the current way of life and there were no problems.
For me though, my biggest issue was finding slang. I'm writing some sex scenes and stuff between couples, no idea what the popular terminology would have been for stuff like orgasm, sex, cum, ass, tits, penis, etc.
>>7742437
I don't have any golden age delusions about today either bruv
>>7742716
How does that contradict what he said?
>>7742769
It is not the pinnacle of American culture and a time of prosperity and happiness, but the period where the first signs of spiritual bankruptcy, nihilism and emptiness started to show. The fifties were already decadent, just less blatantly.
Wanting to go back to the fifties because you hate how things are now is like wanting to go back to the first stages of cancer rather than the time before the illness took hold.
>>7742777
>It is not the pinnacle of American culture
What is, then, in your opinion?
>>7739944
fuck dude, been looking for this tune for a few years not even joking. Listened to hours of doo wop and Les Baxter stuff to try and find this.
>>7739944
I've Been Down So Long It Feels Like Up to Me
>you will never date a healthy young white virgin in the pre feminist golden era of American history
>>7743294
Are all women evidently feminist where you live or something?
>>7742710
>people of color
I can never believe this is a phrase people actually use
>>7743303
Not all of them, but they've all grown up surrounded by feminism ideology and feminist mores. It's like lead in the water supply. Some people consume a ton and wind up mentally stunted (the average tumblrite, for instance, or your run of the mill social activist) and some consume relatively little, but it's everywhere, and once ingested there's no getting rid of it. Like lead, feminism is categorically toxic to life and serves no vital function whatsoever.
11/22/63 maybe
>>7743303
unless you are going for white hicks then yea, most college educated women tend to be, rightly so, feminists unless they're full on retarded
I really fucking hate americunts, your stupid country should be destroyed
>>7743389
I on the other hand find them fascinating.
>>7743389
Please, tell me how yours is better because you have older buildings. Do you cry when you look at the moon and know that your flag will never land there? How does it feel to have a distinct culture that's getting slowly but surely edged out of existence by the alpha American culture? Probably feels bad, but don't worry because it's actually pretty fun to be American. You'll see when we finally accept you into the arms of lady liberty.
>>7743370
>rightly so
There's nothing right about hating women anon
>>7742710
Nah, dude. Unions still had some of their gains left, not nearly as many women were in the workforce, and all sorts other factors made it a worker's paradise.
>>7743389
Belgian, pls go
>>7742777
>the period where the first signs of spiritual bankruptcy, nihilism and emptiness started to show
If you're talking about the beats\niks, they were a counterculture, but not at all a predominant culture. They were like wiggers, remember when On the Road how he starts talking about how being white is so boring and how the negro is a free spirit?
Fuck the 1950s and 1960s only a pussy would want to live in those times, you people are so scared of what is unfamiliar, afraid the brown man will keep you down, pathetic. If you can't deal with life in all its forms, and keep your head about you, than you are flailing in futility anyway, stronger souls are laughing at your weakness. You young men have been apathy fucked again, but it's not too late.
I drunk toooooooooooo much brandy.
>>7743463
I can attest to this, but you have to understand back then spades were actually kind of cool thanks to the jazz scene. Nigger gangster culture didn't exist yet. Acid actually made the previous coolness of the blacks suddenly a lot less cool because blacks can't handle psychedelics.
t. Deadbeat
>>7743500
I'm not saying the jazz wasn't worthwhile, I enjoy free jazz myself. The cancerous parts were the heroin, the alcoholism, the pick up culture, and rejection of responsibility. If you know anything about jazz, you'd know that some great musicians, including Charlie Parker, suffered immensely from these plagues.
>>7739944
Revolutionary Road
>>7739944
>tfw you don't have a qt 50's gf.
>>7739944
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Play it as it Lays by Joan Didion
>>7743463
No, I mean neoliberalism and consumer culture. If anything the beats were symptomatic, they were looking for authenticity in the midst of an increasingly sterile and soulless world.
>>7744732
Look, I don't mean to be rude, but you're just tossing around buzzwords here. Neoliberalism didn't even exist then, it was something that came with Reagan and Thatcher.
>>7743500
Jimmy Hendricks tho
>>7740282
>the 50s were, by and large, a happy, fruitful, peaceful, truly enlightened time. they represented the flowering of the dream of 2000 years of European civilization
WW3 was imminent... Yeah... Yeah....
>>7739944
Last holiday season I was helping my grandmother set up Christmas. She was a teen in the fifties and a twentysomething in the sixties, my that those divisions existed so much back then. We were pulling decorations (mostly kitschy little figurines of people in dickensian clothing caroling, plush snowmen) when I got to the box of coca cola Christmas memorabilia.
I said where do you want this, not passive aggressively or angrily. I disnt think I betrayed any of my super mild disgust at the company's ownership of a month but she must have sensed something in my voice because she snapped her head my direction and said "don't you ever get nostalgic anon?"
I looked at the fucking Dickens family gathered around the tiny plastic old man playing the little balsa piano and didn't feel like that time was better than whatever we've got now. Old man was probably an alcoholic and I bet the wife was fucking the servants. Looked at the coca cola representing her youth, imagined drinking ice cream sodas at a bellhop and didn't really miss that either because it turns out the sweetening agent in the old school soda gave you cancer and I realized that nostalgia is the only thing any of these generations so to speak have in common, and my own peers are probably the first to not reject the past and its morals but reject thought of it at all and totally forego the whole nostalgia thing.
Any other 90s kids feel this?
>>7744779
In the strict sense of the word, yes, but the tendencies that define neoliberalism were already put in motion back then.
If you have a better word for me to use I'll gladly take it.
>>7739944
the catcher in the rye
>>7744952
I think I mostly dislike nostalgia because it seems like the realm of losers who want to go back to the tune before they fucked up irreversibly.
That and a lot of older people waste money on stuff marketed to them through nostalgia, which I hate because I'm a total skinflint.
>>7740282
yeah civil rights, korean war peaceful times
>>7744968
Capitalism, maybe?
The tendencies that define neoliberalism didn't exist then. Neoliberalism was about a massive roll back in taxes for the top earners and shifting competition for business to labor. Labor was not very competitive then because women were competing for labor at what was likely the lowest rate of any time between the dawn of the industrial revolution and today.
>>7742373
Honestly the only reason for complaint about foreigners is racism.
>>7744982
*from business to labor
There is more to it of course, but these were the major impetus
>>7744985
Could be that they have extremely different values from Westerners and are bringing a ton of competition for labor while creating zero jobs except for members of their family.
>>7743397
no other country has that much fucking self pride and arrogance to cry when they look at the moon
>>7744989
While this is true it's of a result of integration not being addressed in todays society. If everybody wasn't scared of saying something racist and getting blasted in the press then maybe we could make some real change and implement integration programs for immigrants.
>>7744952
>Any other 90s kids feel this?
kek
>>7744982
I guess it's the mixture of capitalism, liberal democracy and globalisation.
>>7744993
Why should be so concerned with integrating immigrants? That takes time, money and resources, and it strongly antagonizes their parents and elders. It makes more sense to just tell them not to come in.
>>7744985
Foreigners aren't just racist, they're also sexist and homophobic.
>>7744985
Cultural values are extremely important for the health of a nation. You've gone through the mental gymnastics to convince yourself that it will have no consequences, or if it does, they will surely be positive changes. These people do not share your vision of tolerance and it is unlikely that they will assimilate, but instead, remain in their homogeneous slums and further alienate themselves or try to impose changes on the host nation.
> "Why can't we all just be individuals and Coexist?"
Because culture has societal impacts, groups impose their culture on the entire group. Not only do these people come from barbarian cultures but impoverished, barbarian cultures. Also with third worlders growing exponentially faster than developed countries it is not sustainable to import these people to alleviate their poverty. We import like a million a year when the poor grows like half a billion or more.
>Population control
>closed borders except educated
pick one bleeding heart
>>7743358
Is this book actually good? I'm interested in reading it.
>>7739944
I'm reading The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy
It's set in 1950, starting on New Year's Day
It's followed by L.A. Confidential and White Jazz, which I'm pretty sure are also set in the 50's, and then there's his Underworld USA Trilogy (American Tabloid, The Cold 6,000, Blood's a Rover) which I think are set in the 60's
You could check them out.
>>7742710
>~10% of the population was marginalized so the other 90%'s fun doesn't count
>>7745102
Hehe
>>7744979
Pretty sure were not nostalgic yet because were not old yet, like everyone on 4chins is a teenager to twentysomething. Once we stare our own death in the face well spend our capitalism bux on stuff that makes us remember the good ol days too
>>7746478
Where did you get those percentages from?
