Wakefield's memoir chronicles his move to New York City in the 1950s.

At the end of World War II New York City went through a period of transformation - loved ones were reunited and babies were born into a new era. African American soldiers who fought in the name of democracy demanded equal rights at home. Women left the factories and returned to the domestic front to raise children and cater to their husbands. Vivian Cherry charts this period with lively vignettes full of compassion and gritty street scenes exuding social conciousness.

New York in the 50s is Dan Wakefield's story of a unique time and place in cultural history, when New York City was a hotbed of free love, hot jazz, radical politics, psychoanalysis, and artistic expression. Wakefield found himself in the middle of a world in which anything was possible, and he writes about the era with the keen eye of a historian and the first-hand knowledge and affection of one who lived through a fabled, fertile era. Wakefield enriches his recollections with the first-hand accounts of his friends and colleagues-Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Allen Ginsberg, William F. Buckley, James Baldwin, and others who made New York in the fifties the legend that still exerts such a powerful influence on American life. A documentary film based on the book will be shown at film festivals in the United States and abroad during 1999. A CD of the musical score, composed and produced by Steve Allee, has been released by AlleyOop Music Publishing.

Jane Freilicher (1924?2014) established herself in the 1950s among a generation of New York painters including Helen Frankenthaler, Alex Katz, Joan Mitchell and Larry Rivers. '?50s New York' is the first book to focus on Freilicher?s paintings of that decade -- a body of work that Fairfield Porter perceptively termed "traditional and radical." It includes early still lifes, portraits and the studio views that elucidate her characteristically deft balance of interior and exterior. Painted within various studios in lower Manhattan, the works are evocative of a downtown milieu that has since come to represent the period?s golden age of spirited, improvisational artistic freedom.0The book includes an essay by writer Nathan Kernan; a 1958 conversation between Jane Freilicher and John Ashbery; rare archival material from across the artist?s life; and a full chronology.00Exhibition: Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, USA (19.03.-09.06.2018)

Introduction: Seeing in the dark -- Gay rights: "To be nobody but yourself" -- Feminism: "Meet Jane Crow" -- Civil rights: The war after the wars -- Ecology: Before we knew -- Epilogue: The best of us.

A “lucid, detailed, and imaginative analysis” (The Nation) of the model city that working-class New Yorkers created after World War II—and its tragic demise More than any other city in America, New York in the years after the Second World War carved out an idealistic and equitable path to the future. Largely through the efforts of its working class and the dynamic labor movement it built, New York City became the envied model of liberal America and the scourge of conservatives everywhere: cheap and easy-to-use mass transit, work in small businesses and factories that had good wages and benefits, affordable public housing, and healthcare for all. Working-Class New York is an “engrossing” (Dissent) account of the birth of that ideal and the way it came crashing down. In what Publishers Weekly calls “absorbing and beautifully detailed history,” historian Joshua Freeman shows how the anticommunist purges of the 1950s decimated the ranks of the labor movement and demoralized its idealists, and how the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s dealt another crushing blow to liberal ideals as the city’s wealthy elite made a frenzied grab for power. A grand work of cultural and social history, Working-Class New York is a moving chronicle of a dream that died but may yet rise again.