Welcome to ‘Writing 1968,’ the official website for this project on the 1960s in the United States.

The nineteen-sixties were, without exaggeration, a time of great social, political, and cultural turmoil in the United States. Not surprisingly, there has been considerable debate on the topic of the importance of this period, but much of that was done in hindsight, especially by historians. That is why this project intends to make sense of this period, and the year 1968 in particular, from the perspective of people who lived at that time and who engaged with the ongoing developments through their writing, while those developments were taking place.

The central question in this analysis is: How can the fiction and non-fiction writings of the American authors Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, James Baldwin, Eldridge Cleaver and Vine Deloria offer new insights into the depiction of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the presidential elections during the watershed year of 1968?

Please feel free to navigate the menu above to learn more about these topics.