A failed West Point cadet would coin the phrase "turn on, tune in, and drop out." A confused seventeen-year-old from Newark planned to be an attorney but instead let loose with a poem called "Howl." An Olympic-caliber wrestler authored One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and spent the next twenty-eight years leading a band of merry pranksters on a cross-country, electric Kool-Aid odyssey... These were a few of the men whose radical ideas were forged in the black-and-white '50s. Before the 1960s turned into a frenzy of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, before Kent State, before a battered America fled from Vietnam, a seismic Technicolor shift was underway-led by a group of visionaries who collaborated, competed, went to jail, and fought against an Establishment that fought back just as furiously. From the last days of the Beat Generation to the strange history of LSD in America, from the music of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to the fantastic, teeming celebration at Woodstock, from the civil right movement to the anti-war protests brewing at college campuses across the country, this phenomenal book will let those who were there rediscover the magic and those who weren't discover why the '60s was the decade to beat all others.... Book jacket.