100 books like The White Album

Harris focuses on Oscar night 1968 as four of the five films nominated for Best Picture evinced Hollywood’s reluctant affirmation of the American counterculture. These “pictures at a revolution,” as he terms them—Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and the Oscar winner In the Heat of the Night—signaled a necessary industry re-think, away from bloated old-Hollywood blockbusters (like Dr. Dolittle, the fifth nominee) and towards something more politically savvy and more hip. Harris does well to chronicle the backstage/behind-the-scenes histories of all five of these films.

This American classic by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Larry McMurtry, is read by university students worldwide. It’s set in its own time of indulgent decadence where little value is placed on the lives of individuals met by Danny Deck, the sad-sack protagonist, who denigrates his published work to the point of tearing up a copy of the novel he carries with him before drowning his own sorry self in the river of the Rio Grande. Yet, Danny is as much at fault for the sloppy treatment of the company he keeps as his company is for being disingenuous.   

What McMurtry calls normal life, or mundane happiness, through the voice of novelist Deck, is seen as obtainable if one wants to pursue the creative arts. His conclusion is that the two simply don’t mix. As he explores this idea in a higgledy-piggledy fashion, Deck sets about self-destructing, which has nothing to do… show more.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s son, Mark, wrote this semi-fictional exploratory piece in an autobiographical style while exploring the nature of drug-induced madness coupled with undiagnosed schizophrenia while living an alternative lifestyle in a working commune. Through it all, the nature of humanity is questioned in a humorously chaotic way. And yet he pulls it all together to somehow not only make sense of, but also be enlightened by, the madness of this counterculture lifestyle. 

Mark Vonnegut later returns to university and obtains a medical degree while exploring the use of orthomolecular medicine as a treatment to combat schizophrenia. While successfully obtaining his medical degree, he eventually disavows orthomolecular therapy as a plausible treatment.

Unique among those in Hollywood who dove head first into the American counterculture, Jane Fonda proved too committed to dismiss as a dilettante, too persistent to just fade away, too formidable for the FBI to destroy. Bosworth, a veteran Hollywood biographer (she has written books on Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando as well) uniquely understands political celebrity; she’s never dismissive, but she’s not so easy on her subject either. Because she knows better: Bosworth’s father was the Hollywood 10 attorney Bart Crum. Bosworth surely understands the risks involved in Left-wing celebrity.

The best book written about 1960’s Pop-Culture madness and mayhem. As founding member of The Fugs and a unique literary voice, Ed Sanders tells this tale brilliantly. The warning signs, the goosebumps, and knowing when it’s time to stop are all there in The Family.

A collection marking the fifty-year anniversary of the now famous Time magazine New Hollywood issue, published on December 8, 1967, featuring a gorgeous Robert Rauschenberg-designed, Bonnie and Clyde-inspired cover. The book, aptly subtitled, The New Hollywood Revisited, features essays by a who’s who of counterculture Hollywood’s most influential film reviewers, critics, and historians, including J. Hoberman, Molly Haskell, David Sterritt, and David Thomson.

Vogue praises this as a "magnificent portrait of an American family on the brink" by painting a story of a typical 1970’s family that is influenced by the challenging morals of the time. Exploiting a generational perspective that the breaking of old taboos leads to a better world, this novel drags out tired themes of egoistic flirtation and personal searches for fulfillment to the detriment of others involved, such as the family unit. 

The mother of the story is perhaps the only sympathetic character waking up to the fact that she’s buried herself in calories while avoiding truths she has a hard time facing as she attempts to reshape her being through a more pleasing physical self. The husband, on the other hand, is a failed contemporary minister in love with another one of his parishioners. Without facing up to his own moral shortcomings, he instead justifies his own motives… show more.

Popularised as a 1960s counterculture book, its author, Brautigan, playfully breaks all the rules in a modern Dadaistic style of commentary which is a sort of stream of consciousness that verges on playful and purposeful madness. Thoughts of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass come to mind when trying to make any sense of this author’s zany work here. In a word: trout? No trout. This is no commentary about fishing. It’s a mishmash of essay-like commentaries on an ‘on the road’ lifestyle which does occasionally mention fishing.

Several books focused on the Works Progress Administration (WPA), or discreet parts of it, had been published before Borchert’s was released but this is the best of them. I doubt that any other book will ever tell the story of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) quite so well. On one level, it lays out the project’s scope and walks readers through the politics involved with its creation and continued operation. And on another, it explains what the project meant for the writers it employed and how it influenced their work. Every other book on this list was written by an author employed by the project or another part of the WPA; this book will help you understand them as part of a coherent literary moment in American history.     

A History of Knowledge is a treasure that invites everyone to explore and enjoy. It recounts the history of human progress from primitive times to the 21st century. Van Doren covers the history of ideas, inventions, civilizations, ideologies, and issues of justice, war, and slavery. Almost no famous thinker, emperor, philosopher, inventor, or artist is not mentioned, and his contribution examined. These are two of my favorite quotations; “Our fathers started the revolution, and we are still living it. We could not stop it even if we wanted to.” “The rich are never rich enough... to have enough is simply to be content with what you have. When wanting comes first, you can never have enough. If contentment is placed first, it does not matter how much you have.”