1959: The Year Everything Changed

"One of the Best Books of 2009"
— Washington Post

It was the year of the microchip, the birth-control pill, the space race, and the computer revolution; the rise of Pop art, free jazz, “sick comics,” the New Journalism, and indie films; the emergence of Castro, Malcolm X, and personal superpower diplomacy; the beginnings of Motown, Happenings, and the Generation Gap—all bursting against the backdrop of the Cold War, the fallout-shelter craze, and the first American casualties of the war in Vietnam.
It was a year when the shockwaves of the new ripped the seams of daily life, when humanity stepped into the cosmos and commandeered the conception of human life, when the world shrank but the knowledge needed to thrive in it expanded exponentially, when outsiders became insiders, when categories were blurred and taboos trampled, when we crossed into a “new frontier” that offered the twin prospects of infinite possibilities and instant annihilation—a frontier that we continue to explore exactly fifty years later, at an eerily similar turning point.

In 1959: The Year Everything Changed, Slate columnist Fred Kaplan vividly chronicles this vital, overlooked year that set the world as we know it in motion. Drawing on original research, including untapped archives and interviews with major figures of the time, Kaplan pieces together the vast, untold story of a civilization in flux—and paints vivid portraits of the men and women whose creative energies, ideas, and inventions paved the way for the new era. They include:

Norman Mailer, musing on the hipster and the H-bomb while fusing journalism and literature in wildly new, influential ways; Lenny Bruce, remaking stand-up comedy by loosening the language and skewering politics and religion; Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman, shattering the structures of jazz; John Cassavetes, making a new kind of movie, with improvised dialogue, shot in the city streets, outside the Hollywood system; Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown, insinuating black urban music into mainstream pop culture; Barney Rosset, the owner of Grove Press, suing the government’s censors and toppling obscenity laws; Malcolm X and Medgar Evers, advancing new and militant paths to civil rights and racial politics; Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Allan Kaprow, blurring the boundaries between art and life; Jack Kilby, a self-described “tinkerer,” inventing the microchip, which triggers the digital age; Margaret Sanger, a radical activist in her eighties, spurring renegade scientists to invent a “magic pill” that lets women control their reproductive processes and unleashes the sexual and feminist revolutions; and John F. Kennedy, the coalescing figure of the era, campaigning for president as a young outsider, keen to grapple with the “unknown opportunities and peril” of the coming “new frontier”—just as Barack Obama, an even unlikelier outsider, confronts the eve of a new decade in our own turbulent time.

Praise for 1959: The Year Everything Changed

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"Energetic and engaging... Anyone old enough to remember the '50s will be astonished to discover how many revolutionary seeds were sewn in the final year of that decade. Others who read 1959 will get a compelling and concise lesson in American social, cultural and political history." Washington Post

"This sprawling, holistic joy of a book explores, expands and provokes reassessment of an entire era--not just a year--in a way that is deeply satisfying and enlightening. Social, political and historical commentary doesn't get much better than this, and it qualifies as a terrific summer read: easy to read because of the polished style, but delivering some meaty subject matter along the way." Daily Kos

"Clever...fun. Kaplan rhapsodizes about the liberating consequences of the social, cultural, political and technological changes that burst forth 50 years ago...makes an intriguing case that 1959 was an authentic annus mirablis." Wall Street Journal

"Immensely enjoyable reading...a first-rate book."
GEORGE PACKER, The New Yorker

"Fascinating...a cabinet of wonders... Those who love the AMC series Mad Men...will find much to love in Kaplan's book."
Los Angeles Times

“1959 is a riveting account of the year our modern age began. Everything did change, and you’ll be amazed by how much was going on, and how much it has affected the way you live your life now.”
KEVIN BAKER, author of Striver’s Row, Dreamland, and Paradise Alley

"An engrossing story about not just where the '60s came from but the birth of the future. Kaplan does a masterful job of weaving together the strands - in politics, society, culture, and science - that have brought us to the post-modern age."
JONATHAN ALTER, Newsweek columnist and author of The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope

"Take a ride on the New Frontier with Fred Kaplan, your insightful (and hip) guide to the space race, thermonuclear war, the civil rights movement, the 'sick comics,' the Beats and the beginnings of the Vietnam War, all to a soundtrack by Dave Brubeck, Ornette Coleman, Miles and Motown."
DONALD FAGEN, co-founder, Steely Dan

“It turns out there’s only one degree of separation between Miles Davis, the brilliant jazz innovator, and Herman Kahn, the Strangelovian nuclear-war theorist—and his name is Fred Kaplan. No one else could throw this fabulous cocktail party of a popular history, teeming with defiant hipsters, visionary inventors, artistic rulebreakers, and troublemakers of all kinds.”
HENDRIK HERTZBERG, senior editor, The New Yorker