The best hippie books

Perhaps you’re already aware of all of these books. Well, allow me to introduce Nebraska-born author Wright Morris—a perpetually ignored force of nature. Morris mainly wrote award-winning fiction, but this collection of essays was a refreshing and straightforward way of looking at, to take one offbeat example, hippies: “Hippies share some knowledge of where they have been, but no demonstrable insight into where they are going…What they share is a condition, not a direction.” Morris even temporarily torpedoes his own genre to make his point. “Who needs fiction? What could be stranger than the news on the hour?” In 1968 America, the ‘truth’ was indeed stranger than fiction.

Finder curated a retrospective collection of 60s books, theatre, music, television, poetry, architecture, and politics. It opens with passages from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, James Baldwin on civil rights, and Hannah Arendt on Eichmann.

Then John Updike muses on the big bang theory, E. J. Kahn, Jr. captures Harvard professors’ view of student protest. Next Kenneth Tynan reviews Bye Bye Birdie, Lillian Ross listens to Sergeant Pepper, then teams with Jane Kramer to parse Marshal McLuhan. Robert Rice muses on the humour of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and A. J. Liebling looks at Cassius Clay before he became Muhammad Ali… and much more.

It’s a cornucopia of well-written, intellectually stimulating prose and poetry written in and about a perplexing decade. It illuminates what I remember—even when I don’t agree—and makes me aware of much that I missed, misunderstood, or misinterpreted at… show more.

Walt Kelly’s tales of Pogo Possum and Albert the Alligator in the Okefenokee Swamp began in 1948. Like many daily cartoon strips it featured anthropomorphic characters. The humour was sweet, gentle, and “ridickelwockle,” letting Pogo fly under the radar of censorship until they noticed that Kelly was lampooning politicians. “Family” newspapers banned the strip, but Kelly had captured his readers’ hearts.

Walt Kelley expressed the essence of the anti-Vietnam War protest when he had Pogo say, “We have seen the enemy and he is us.”

This book is written by a hypnotherapist who talked to various psychic mediums to apparently, channel spiritual knowledge on big-picture questions. Although this is very “woo woo,” I feel my hippy inheritance entitles me to such explorations! In the face of something as devastating as suicide, “whatever works,” works for me, and I found great consolation in the idea of a soul’s evolution through various reincarnations. The chapter on suicide presents a theory of Spirit, which sees the act of suicide not as a sin, but as a choice (though not a recommended one) that still allows for future growth. For those left behind, it charts a path through guilt and anger to eventual acceptance. 

This novel encapsulates my two loves; a fracturing society and the wilderness. Partially inspired by a real 60s commune, the storyline takes a turn when its free-loving hippies are ousted from their eternal summer of love. Lured by the promise of land and lack of authoritarian oversight, they pack up a school bus and head for Alaska. The characters quickly find that living truly ‘back to nature’ is much harsher and more deadly than they had imagined. Their struggle to adapt makes for unmissable scenes of both man’s inhumanity and solidarity.

Drop City shines where misogyny meets free love and California dreams crash-land in the Alaskan wilderness.

TWEC is a hippie homesteading encyclopedia: 450 tabloid-size pages of “mind-blowing,” semi-practical idealism. The back cover photo is of the earth from space. The caption reads, “We can’t put it together. It is together.”

The first pages of the 620,000 copies published in 1971 featured Buckminster Fuller on systems, Arthur Koestler on consciousness, Teilhard de Chardin on spirituality, and Paul Ehrlich on The Population Bomb.

TWEC primarily offered mail-order sources for books and tools about agriculture, farming, edible plants, gardening, raising goats, chickens, pigs, building solar-heated buildings, well-drilling, gold mining, and much more, including a continuing story of how Divine Right crossed the USA Urge, his ’63 VW Microbus.

Like youth culture in the 60s, The Last Whole Earth Catalog was varied, challenging, seditious, profound, silly, exciting, practical, confusing, and confused. I loved it.

I love this book because it makes me realize mine wasn’t the only crazy bohemian family out there! This extremely funny read with authentic ’60s photos is structured as a test to determine if you really are an ACOH (Adult Child of Hippies). People might find this strange, but humour was a necessary ingredient in my coming to terms with my father’s suicide (and the reason my novel is both tragic and funny). Although my father struggled with mental illness and addiction, he had a wickedly funny black sense of humour. For me, it is a tribute to my father to see the ridiculous and laugh even in the face of grief. Certainly, there is much to laugh about in the flower child era.

Gayle Brandeis’s intimate memoir of wrestling with her mother’s suicide following a long mental illness kept me company in the ways it mirrored my own experience. It is sometimes easier to mourn a stranger’s pain, as you edge towards your own grief. Brandeis’s reading through her mother’s letters, with their paranoid delusions and grandiose aspirations, “passionate and creatively punctuated,” rang true to my father’s crazy literary outpourings. Her experiences of entering her mother’s home to witness the evidence of her last activities, to the almost physical trauma of learning the stark details of her mother’s suicide method, comforted me in their familiarity. The suicide of a mentally ill parent leaves a lot of guilt and confusion in its wake. Anger and resentment aren’t what one “should” feel after a death of a parent, but Brandeis doesn’t sugarcoat the complex mess of emotions that needs to be untangled. 

This helpful book digs into the stigma of suicide, how it has been viewed as taboo, and how the bodies of people who committed suicide have traditionally even been denied burial. The people left behind find themselves isolated by their shame and the fear that others will shy away from a topic considered sinful in most religions. This was certainly my experience. Had my father died of cancer or a heart attack, I would have talked openly of his death and received a lot of support. But I felt his mental illness, addiction, and suicide too dark a topic to impose on anyone.

Happy, functional families don’t go through things like this. It was an extension of the shame I’d internalized as a child growing up with socially divergent parents who struggled with mental health issues. Alexander, who lost her own mother to suicide, gives links to survivor support groups,… show more.

Although this book isn’t about suicide, I include it because families with mental health issues, often exacerbated by the “anything goes” ethos of hippy culture, can suffer from confused or “enmeshed” parent/child boundaries. It was one of the first, and I think best self-help books I ever read. With great clarity, it showed me what was destructive in my family of origin. Enmeshment or “parentification,” basically using a child to meet the emotional needs of an adult, is not widely understood and often goes undetected (versus more obvious physical or sexual abuse).

Dr. Love’s book gave me straightforward guidelines for being a non-destructive parent myself, something I think I did achieve due to much self-education and counselling prior to having kids. It’s always been obvious to me that my father’s mental illness and substance abuse took root in his very unhappy childhood. I think my father would be glad that… show more.