Previous Convictions: A Journey Through the 1950s

National Book Award nominee (Sixties Going on Seventies) and former New York Times film critic Sayre uncomfortably juxtaposes snapshots of 1950s American culture and politics with glimpses of her own singular life. Sayre went to Radcliffe and was close to such literary giants as Edmund Wilson and John O'Hara. At the same time, this privileged life of ``lowered voices and pale cashmere'' was fractured by the increasing fragility of her mother's mental health and premonitions of the social and sexual upheavals of the 1960s. The cast of characters is intriguing. Sayre suggests that T.S. Eliot's New Criticism (which advocated repudiating biographical speculation in literary criticism) was motivated by the disarray of the poet's own marriage; she offers a penetrating profile of college classmate Dorothy Dean, who was black, fiercely intellectual and ultimately a suicidal habitue of Warhol's Factory; and she pays affectionate tributes to Gregory Corso, James Thurber and others. Brief ``documentary'' chapters offering textbook takes on the Red scare and desegregation merely exaggerate the schism in the book between the intimately personal and the broadly historical. Those in search of satisfying cultural history of the period ought to look elsewhere. Photos not seen by PW. (Nov.)