America's Child: A Woman's Journey Through the Radical Sixties

Poet and playwright Sherman revisits her 20s in Berkeley and New York City when she emerged as a lesbian, antiwar activist and artist in her own right. She attended college at Berkeley in 1958, and lived on Telegraph Avenue with artists Diane Wakoski and La Monte Young, who would usher inviting new experiences for the author. She resolved to lose her virginity immediately, but her attraction to women caused emotional conflict within her. Two years later, she demonstrated against the House Un-American Activities Committee in May 1960 and experimented with psychotropic drugs. Moving to New York in 1961, she hung out with beat poets at the Deux Megots and the Metro Café, and began publishing her own poetry thanks to Denise Levertov and others. Sherman chronicles early iconoclastic work with the Hardware Poets Playhouse and La Mama ETC. Occasionally murky and erratic in structure, Sherman's memoir portrays the thrilling unreality of the times. (Nov.)