It Wasn't Pretty, Folks, but Didn't We Have Fun?: Esquire in the Sixties - Hardcover

Polsgrove, Carol

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393037924 ISBN 13: 9780393037920

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1995

Synopsis

The sixties in America was a wild, giddy ride, an amazing Technicolor adventure, and no magazine caught the spirit of its apocalyptic fun as definitively as Esquire. Its brilliant, buccaneering editor Harold Hayes transformed the once-somnolent men's fashion magazine into a literary and cultural proving ground, where pure iconoclasm and blazing talent reigned. Art director George Lois put Sonny Liston on the cover as Santa Claus and Muhammad Ali as St. Sebastian. Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Garry Wills, Michael Herr, and others virtually invented a "New Journalism" equal to the task of deconstructing celebrity, celebrating pop culture, comprehending wars and demonstrations and riots and assassinations. Diane Arbus captured photographic images that reflected a disturbing, hidden America, and fiction writers as diverse as Norman Mailer and Raymond Carver did much the same in words.
Journalist and historian Carol Polsgrove has written the definitive history of this decade-long high-water mark in American magazine journalism.

About this title

About the Author

Carol Polsgrove is an associate professor of journalism at Indiana University.

From the Back Cover

"It Wasn't Pretty, Folks,. . . is an engrossing account of Esquire and its writers catching the revolutionary spirit of America during the 1960s; and it shows how the violence and false virtue of that period blended ideally with the vision of Esquire's leading editor, Harold Hayes, an ex-Marine and the wayward son of a Southern minister who energized the magazine with the wrath of God and Camp Lejeune and sometimes the luncheon wisdom of a dry martini--creating a marvelously unpredictable editorial product that was in perfect balance with that tilted time in American history."--Gay Talese

"It is a splendid book and it reminded me that, indeed we all did have fun."--Robert Benton

"History is not dead. Journalists like Carol Polsgrove knock us over the head with that fact when they bring history into living color with this wonderful book from behind the scenes at Esquire in the sixties. Polsgrove's book is another addition to chronicle the part of the sixties when truth and guts and quality and innovation really did matter to journalists, and today's excuse for journalism pales. Let's air out all the laundry and more of it please." --Molly Ivins

From the Inside Flap

The sixties in America was a wild, giddy ride, an amazing Technicolor adventure, and no magazine caught the spirit of its apocalyptic fun as definitively as Esquire. Its brilliant, buccaneering editor Harold Hayes transformed the once-somnolent men's fashion magazine into a literary and cultural proving ground, where pure iconoclasm and blazing talent reigned. Art director George Lois put Sonny Liston on the cover as Santa Claus and Muhammad Ali as St. Sebastian. Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Garry Wills, Michael Herr, and others virtually invented a "New Journalism" equal to the task of deconstructing celebrity, celebrating pop culture, comprehending wars and demonstrations and riots and assassinations. Diane Arbus captured photographic images that reflected a disturbing, hidden America, and fiction writers as diverse as Norman Mailer and Raymond Carver did much the same in words.

Journalist and historian Carol Polsgrove has written the definitive history of this decade-long high-water mark in American magazine journalism. She has interviewed many of the living participants and she tells the story of this wildly inventive, deadly serious institution with a brio and immediacy appropriate to her task. It Wasn't Pretty. . . is both a tribute to its wonderful subject and a challenge to the magazine journalism of our own day. it is essential reading for all students and survivors of the sixties and for everyone concerned with magazine writing, design, and editing at their peak of achievement.

Reviews

" More than any other medium, magazines companionably track the times," Indiana University journalism professor Polsgrove maintains in this detailed, fascinating history of the Esquire Harold Hayes built in the 1960s. Insulated to some degree by publisher Arnold Gingrich from the "suits" and supported by a changing but consistently talented editorial and art team, Hayes defined a vision and established a personality for Esquire that made it one of the most exciting, appealing publications of a lively and challenging period. Drawing on the magazine itself, archival research, and dozens of interviews, Polsgrove probes group creativity and the writer-editor relationship as she traces the birth of "the New Journalism" (which Hayes insisted wasn't new) and the superb work Esquire elicited from writers like Mailer, Baldwin, Bellow, and Vidal, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Garry Wills, John Sack, and Michael Herr. Polsgrove's title at first glance seems worthy of an Esquire Dubious Achievement Award; however, after reading her vivid institutional history, its oddity seems altogether appropriate. A useful resource of U.S. cultural and intellectual trends as well as a history of magazine journalism. Mary Carroll

Popular culture has become a popular subject for books by academics. Polsgrove (journalism, Indiana Univ.) here writes about a publication that has had marked influence on our times: Esquire magazine. Hugh Merrill's book Esky: The Early Years at Esquire (LJ 5/1/95) gives a picture of the Esquire of the 1930s and 1940s; this book concentrates on the 1960s, when Harold Hayes was editor. It was a time when Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and James Baldwin were among the contributing writers and the magazine covered politics in Chicago and war in Vietnam. Polsgrove, who had access to the letters of Hayes, here includes a list of sources and copious notes on each chapter. This would be a useful complement to Merrill's book in popular culture or journalism collections.?Rebecca Wondriska, Trinity Coll. Lib., Hartford, Ct.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Shortly after eleven, they watched the scene at Lincoln Park. Several thousand young people stirred in the darkness while policemen in riot gear guarded the park's southwest corner. Hundreds more people were pouring into the park. Burroughs went off to the Oxford Club Bar on Clark Street. The others crossed onto the grass of the park, unlit in the cloudy night. They heard that police were massing by Lake Shore Drive.

Ginsberg, Genet, Southern, Berendt, and Seaver linked arms and walked through the crowd in that direction. Genet's presence rippled through the crowd.

"Hey, wow, Jean Genet's here."

"I didn't think he really existed. Oh, beautiful."

Ginsberg began to chant "Owwmmm" and others joined in. The sound filled the whole park. Even the protestors at the barricades gave up shouting "Hell, no, we won't go" and joined the chant.

Every now and then a move from the police would set off a wave of panic. There would be shouts of "Walk, walk, don't run, don't run!" The panic would die down.

Ginsberg sat down a hundred feet away from the barricade. He became the center of a couple hundred young people chanting, "Owwwmmmm."

At 12:30 a roar down the whole line of the barricades set off a stampede. Everyone was running, screaming through the dark. . . .

Edition details

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0393037924
• ISBN 13: 9780393037920
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 335