Word: cowans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...this has happened to Paul Cowan. The radicalization of Cowan and thousands of his peers was not the permissively-reared child's petulant reaction to his first frustrations, as psychologists such as Bruno Bettleheim smugly tell the world. It was the rational exhaustion of every sanctioned approach to winning back the Dream. These were the first casualties of the affluent society's rupture. Their confidence that hard work and good will could stir the national conscience died shortly after Jack Kennedy. They travelled the "proper channels" to dead-ends that became increasingly suggestive of a coherent pattern. They became...
...Making of an Un-American is a personal history of the Sixties by one of its spiritual orphans. Paul Cowan ??. The story of his journey through Kennedy liberalism and unresolved revolutionism is so artfully told that it escapes being a cliche. It rises above the mountain of literature, autobiographical to clinical, on youth "alienation" to deserve amply Jack Newfield's praise as "the collective biography of the generation that was born on the New Frontier, baptized on the Mississippi Delta, and educated by Vietnam...
Those of us who were still in junior high school when Cowan was leaving Harvard have a strangely marginal relationship with the generation that Newfield describes. Any inclination we have that work within the system is work wasted stems from an ex post facto education. Our disillusionment was rooted in hearsay, however close the source, rather than experience. We never organized black people into voting blocks in the Deep South only to see white power groups intimidate them into submission while the law looked the other way. We never followed the "new politicians" to the brink of social challenge only...
Critical recognition of Cowan's writing dates back to 1963, when as a CRIMSON editor he garnered the Dana Reed Prize for the year's best piece of undergraduate writing. He has since moved on to such journals as Ramparts, Commentary, and the Village Voice...
...Cowan described his Harvard experience as part of the gradual disillusionment traced in Making, his first book. He spoke freely to his admirers about the frustration of his early-sixties involvement in the Civil Rights movement and the Peace Corps...