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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
(born 1925) Patrician chronicler, playwright and critic of the American century Vidal has skewered politics, sexuality and religion in novels and essays, identifying himself with the historical establishment through family ties, yet standing outside it through his wit, homosexuality and preferences for Europe. The City and the Pillar (1948) shocked readers with its discussion of homosexuality while in Myra Breckinridge (1968) the sexual/media satire is broad. Messiah (1954) tackles American religion. Historical novels, including Burr (1973), Lincoln (1984), Hollywood (1990) and The Smithsonian Institution (1998) recast American history Vidal, who twice ran for Congress, has published extensively as a liberal political critic and essayist on American sexuality (Gore Vidal, Sexually Speaking, 1999).
Industry:Culture
(born 1925) With actor-wife Joanne Woodward (1930–; m. 1958), Newman has carved out a distinguished role in American film and theater, where his own physical presence has been nuanced by humor and intelligence. Among Newman’s best roles are those of complex, troubled outsiders (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1958; Hud, 1963; Cool Hand Luke, 1967, etc.). Newman also directed Woodward in the Oscar-nominated Rachel, Rachel (1968). The couple have also become known as liberal activists, supporting causes with proceeds of the “Newman’s Own” line of foods since the 1980s.
Industry:Culture
(1925 – 1965) Often seen as the counterpart to Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X became the inspiration for militant activists during the later stages of the Civil Rights movement, as it moved away from non-violent protest to advocacy of Black Power. Born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, and brought up largely in a detention home in Mason, Michigan, Malcolm X became a street hustler in Boston, MA and New York City, NY before converting in 1947 to the Nation of Islam while in prison. Largely self-educated and very intelligent, able to see through the hypocrisy of the way in which liberal white Americans responded to the Civil Rights movement, he quickly became national spokesman of the Black Muslims.
In opposition to King, Malcolm X proclaimed that the way for African Americans to advance was through force, not by seeking aid from white America. Preaching “an eye for an eye” and calling for fights against racism “by any means necessary” he underscored the paramilitary strength of the Black Muslims as the response to racial oppression and stressed self-help through black businesses.
Some commentators have argued that Malcolm X understood American society better than civil-rights leaders who believed they could move it towards racial equality and harmony He refused to accept the common notion of an “American Dilemma,” a tension between American ideals and the problems of caste and color. In this formulation, Americans merely needed to be persuaded to live according to their highest ideals. For Malcolm X, instead, American history was a record of violence against slaves, against American Indians and others; the great revolutionary documents had been formulated deliberately to exclude African Americans. As such, the United States was fundamentally violent; since power was the national obsession, African Americans needed to pursue power. Such ideas found adherents among student militants, like H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael.
In the eyes of some supporters, Malcolm X was widely misunderstood at the time.
Partly this was because he had a penchant for shocking white America, and did so very effectively Following President Kennedy’s assassination, he announced that the event was an instance of “chickens coming home to roost.” He was accused by his detractors of preaching hate and being a racist in reverse. But, according to James Baldwin, he was concerned less with whites than with building self-esteem among blacks and “decolonizing” the black mind. Nevertheless, he did acknowledge later that he had been wearing “a racist straight-jacket” while with the Black Muslims.
King and Malcolm X may have been opposites in a way but King depended upon Malcolm X for some of his success. While in the Birmingham Jail, King argued that white Americans needed to heed the call of moderate blacks like himself, lest they face more radical and violent elements. In their famous meeting in 1965, the two commented that in spite of obvious differences they both depended on each other.
Malcolm X broke with the Black Muslims in April 1964, following their reprimand for his Kennedy assassination comments. A pilgrimage to Mecca caused him to question much of Elijah Muhammad’s preaching. He returned to the United States as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabbazz with the plan of building a more inclusive and internationalist organization to oppose racial oppression (the Organization for Afro-American Unity). He was assassinated in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, NY on February 21, 1965.
Debates continue over whether the assassins were under the direction of the leadership of the Nation of Islam.
Malcolm X’s influence arguably increased after his death with the posthumous Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). In 1992 Spike Lee produced a film relying heavily on the Autobiography, after many scripts by black intellectuals had gone unmade, debates continuing about the manner in which his life and politics should be portrayed.
Industry:Culture
(1925 – 1984) Film and television director, writer and producer. Most famous for his revisionist western films of the 1960s and 1970s, Peckinpah was also a pioneer of the adult western television dramas of the 1950s and 1960s, when he wrote such programs as Gunsmoke and directed and produced the critically acclaimed series The Westerner (1960). In his film masterpiece, The Wild Bunch (1969), his experiments with editing, slow motion, dialogue and the choreographic depiction of violence and death have been copied and emulated by a generation of action and western film-makers, most notably Walter Hill.
Industry:Culture
(1925 – 1985) As the independent movie Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992) argues, Hudson’s career represents a telling lie embedded within American culture. Tall, handsome Hudson romanced Doris Day in sitcoms writ large, while other romantic roles made him a popular male actor in film and television. At the same time, his secret identity was known to many gays, but was shielded from his general fan audience until his death from AIDS. The split between his public and private personae adds eerie intertexts to his film romances like All that Heaven Allows (1955) and Man’s Favorite Sport (1964).
Industry:Culture
(1925 – 1998) Ironic and erudite, Hawkes’ elaborate writings attempt to radically re-fashion fictional structures. A restrained writing style, combined with an interest in the erotic and violent spaces of the modern landscape, produce an eerie, often Gothic, atmosphere in his work.
Although generally much admired by writers and critics who support the experimental conceits of avant-garde or postmodern literature, unsympathetic readers find his novels and short stories dry and often overly formal. A hint of his style and concerns can be gleaned from a provocative 1965 statement that plot, character, setting and theme were the true enemies of fiction. Hawkes’ novel The Blood Oranges (1971) was the basis for a 1997 film of the same name.
Industry:Culture
(born 1926) Associate of Martin Luther King, Jr. and fellow pastor of a Montgomery congregation at the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Afterwards, he joined King in founding the Southern Christian Leadership Coalition, becoming its secretary-treasurer.
He remained in this position until King’s assassination in 1968, when he took over as president. Later that year, he led the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, DC, building Resurrection City, USA, a small encampment of huts in the heart of the city. He then organized Operation Breadbasket, designed to persuade African Americans to buy only from companies that did not discriminate against them.
Industry:Culture
(born 1926) Rock ’n’ roll pioneer known best for his flamboyant guitar playing, duck walk and runins with the law. His first single for Chess Records, “Maybellene,” was released in 1955.
The following year “Roll Over Beethoven” defined the spirit of rock ’n’ roll, rising to the top of the charts. Mixing country music guitar picking with an R&B beat and incisive, humorous lyrics aimed at teenagers, Berry created an interracial music for an interracial audience in the 1950s. Still rocking in the early twenty-first century he has been the single greatest influence on the subsequent development of rock ’n’roll.
Industry:Culture
(1926 – 1962) Vulnerable, funny, alluring but not threatening, this platinum blonde with pouty lips and breathy voice remains the ultimate sex symbol of the postwar era decades after her mysterious suicide. Born Norma Jean Mortenson, she suffered through a horrendous childhood of abuse before escaping into marriage, modeling and film, where she debuted in 1948. Stardom came in the 1950s along with marriages to American baseball icon Joe Di Maggio and the playwright Arthur Miller. Along the way Marilyn produced movies, characters and even scenes that live vividly in the American imagination—production numbers from Gentleman Prefer Blondes (1953), a blowing skirt from The Seven Year Itch (1955), the naive Sugar from Some Like it Hot (1959). Psychological problems and drugs marred her last years before her death from an overdose. This has been linked subsequently to her involvement with President John Kennedy, to whom she had offered a famous birthday tribute (“Happy Birthday Mr President”) before the lives of two icons of the 1960s were cut short. We do not forget either.
Industry:Culture
(1926 – 1991) Jazz musician Miles Davis cut his musical chops on be-bop and nurtured his musicality in the New York City jazz lifestyle colored by American race relations. As a trumpet player, Miles was not known for a conventional virtuosity but rather for the ways in which he used the trumpet with his raspy muted sound (not unlike his own voice) to add color and nuance to his music. Davis’ music was often the precursor of change and the avant-garde in jazz music. His recording, Kind of Blue (1959), remains one of the best examples of his unique musicianship. Davis politicized jazz music along racial lines and encouraged an ambivalent relationship with his audiences, particularly his white audience.
Industry:Culture
