Authors’ Portraits, Sixties Style

Our current exhibit, “The Sixties: Remembering Who Was T/here,” pays tribute to, among other, eleven influential novels of the era. Though the exhibit features their front covers, we were also struck by the telling array of author portraits, in most cases from the back of the dust jacket.

Back and front of the dust jackets:

Joseph Heller. Catch-22. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961.

Mary McCarthy. The Group. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963. Photograph by Gisèle Freund.

William S. Burroughs. Nova Express. New York: Grove Press, 1964. Photograph by Martha Rocher.

James Baldwin. Going to Meet the Man. New York: Dial Press, 1965.

Jacqueline Susann. Valley of the Dolls. New York: Bernard Geis Associates / distributed by Random House, 1966. Photo by Bruno of Hollywood.

Richard Brautigan. Trout Fishing in America. San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation / distributed by City Light Books, 1967. Photo from front of dust jacket.

Norman Mailer. Why Are We In Vietnam? A Novel. New York: Putnam, 1967. Black and white photo by Harold Straus.

John Barth. Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968.

Gore Vidal. Myra Breckinridge. Boston: Little, Brown, 1968.

Kurt Vonnegut. Slaughterhouse-five: or, The Children’s Crusade, a duty-dance with death. New York: Delacorte Press, 1969.

Maya Angelou. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Random House, 1969. Photo by Henry Monroe.