Best of
United-States

1962

Negroes with Guns


Robert Franklin Williams - 1962
    Frustrated and angered by violence condoned or abetted by the local authorities against blacks, the small community of Monroe, North Carolina, brought the issue of armed self-defense to the forefront of the civil rights movement. The single most important intellectual influence on Huey P. Newton, the founder of the Black Panther Party, Negroes with Guns is a classic story of a man who risked his life for democracy and freedom.

The Willowdale Handcar


Edward Gorey - 1962
    On the way to nowhere in particular they pass a number of odd characters and observe a series of baffling phenomena, from a house burning down in a field to a palatial mansion perched precariously on a bluff.At once deeply vexing and utterly hilarious, darkly mysterious and amusingly absurd, The Willowdale Handcar is vintage Edward Gorey.

The Other America: Poverty in the United States


Michael Harrington - 1962
    This anniversary edition includes Michael Harrington’s essays on poverty in the 1970s and ’80s as well as a new introduction by Harrington’s biographer, Maurice Isserman. This illuminating, profoundly moving classic is still all too relevant for today’s America.When Michael Harrington’s masterpiece, The Other America, was first published in 1962, it was hailed as an explosive work and became a galvanizing force for the war on poverty. Harrington shed light on the lives of the poor—from farm to city—and the social forces that relegated them to their difficult situations. He was determined to make poverty in the United States visible and his observations and analyses have had a profound effect on our country, radically changing how we view the poor and the policies we employ to help them.

A Girl Called Chris


Marg Nelson - 1962
    Unable to get a scholarship for college despite stellar grades, Chris unwillingly takes a summer job at the local cannery, hoping to make enough money to pay for her tuition.

A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard


Paul Bowles - 1962
    Thus, of the men in these stories, Salam uses suggestions supplied by smoking kif to rid himself of a possible enemy. He of the Assembly catches himself up in the mesh of his own kif-dream and begins to act it out in reality; Idir's victory over Lahcen is the classical story of the kif-smoker's ability to outwit the drinker. Driss the soldier, with aid of kif, proves the existence of magic to his enlightened superior officer. For all of them the kif-pipe is the means to attaining a state of communication not only with others but above all with themselves."His work is art. At his best Paul Bowles has no peer." —Time"[W]riters and artists such as Williams, Jack Kerouac, Francis Bacon, Christopher Isherwood, Truman Capote, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg to Tangier. . .sought Bowles as an oracle, a writer whose work demonstrated its author as an original who saw farther, deeper, and clearer, and who refused to flinch."--The AustralianPaul Bowles (1910-1999) was an expatriate composer, author, and translator. His other famous literary works include The Sheltering Sky, Travels: Collected Writings 1950-1993, and Without Stopping

Ballad of Calamity Creek


Elisabeth Hamilton Friermood - 1962
    When her father put his foot down, saying that one year of college was quite enough for any girl, Ann Todd left Indianapolis for the newly established Stoney Hill, deep in the mountains of southeast Kentucky. As a new teacher, she soon found that she had quite as much to learn from her students as she had to teach.