"William Shirer's best-selling The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich published in 1960 provided a straight-forward historical/journalistic approach to documenting and accounting for Nazism. The book's publication represented one of the first attempts in America to come to terms with World War II. Shirer's book however, stood in contrast to other, more experimental artistic and literary works of that year that sought to create a new language to understand the trauma of World War II and to imagine a new world. In 1960, Al Filries provides a new understanding of the postwar avant-garde. Looking at a wide range of artists, thinkers, and writers, including Paul Celan, James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, Muriel Rukeyser and Hannah Arendt, Al Filreis discusses how artists in 1960 turned back to the war of 1939-45 and to the unprecedented horror and mass killings of that period. 1960 reflects on the belatedness of that artistic response and reconsiders the start of the Sixties that went beyond the supposed ideological divisions of the Fifties and the critique of conformity and consumerism inspired by the Beats and others. The work that came out of this period, which linked the legacies of fascism and anti-semitism with American racism, also sought to reclaim the more radical elements of modernism in poetry, fiction, theater, film, memoir, and sculpture. Turning to popular culture, Filreis examines how the teleplays of Rod Serling and the music of John Coltrane, steeped in the horrors of World War II, also provided visions of hope"-- Provided by publisher.