Link Banana

That’s what Rachel Dandielo argued is last weekend’s New York Times Book Review:

The year saw the advent of everything from Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and Dr. Seuss’ “Yertle the Turtle” to “Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak, that year’s Nobel laureate in literature; the first American edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita”; Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”; John Kenneth Galbraith’s “Affluent Society”; Philip Roth’s story “Goodbye, Columbus”; and Jack Kerouac’s “Dharma Bums” — not to mention Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape,” Harold Pinter’s “Birthday Party,” Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” and Orson Welles’s “Touch of Evil.” Robert Frank captured the uncertain tenor of the time in his 1958 photography book, “The Americans,” as did Jasper Johns in his 1958 painting “Three Flags,” in which he superimposed three American flags, each smaller than the next, transforming the familiar into the abstract, the iconic into the unsettled.